Olof Palme – The Murder, the Motive, and the Cover-Up

Swedish experts Ola Tunander and Gunnar Wall recently met to discuss the unsolved 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.

The Dissident Club of Stockholm met with professor emeritus Ola Tunander and author Gunnar Wall to discuss the February 28, 1986 assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme. Ola Tunander is a leading authority on psychological warfare, covert operations, political murders and the like. Gunnar Wall has written several books on the Palme murder and two of them have won him the “Guldspaden” (golden shovel) award, the most prestigious prize for investigative journalism in Sweden. The following is an edited transcript of a 28 minute excerpt from their 2.5 hour conversation. The excerpted discussion, with English subtitles, is available here.

Mattias Forsgren (moderator): Ola, if you could put this into context. All this concerning political assassinations and intelligence services, one might wonder about these things. Many people think that it’s absurd to consider that the murder of Olof Palme was a politically motivated hit-job carried out with the involvement of police and intelligence services. My view is that the judgement that all of this is unreasonable, is based on ignorance. Most people simply do not know what these organizations do and how many similar things have happened in the world.

Ola Tunander: Well, yes. This is of course true. Sweden has had several diplomats who have played a certain role, for example Hans Blix and Rolf Ekéus. But those who have played the most central role are Folke Bernadotte, Dag Hammarskjöld and Olof Palme, and they were all shot. What you see is that people who have tried to establish a dialogue with the Russians with Moscow—and that goes for Italians, Germans, British, and folks from several other countries—have either been seriously discredited and forced to leave, or they have been shot.

Mattias Forsgren: You’re saying that Olof Palme falls into a category of officials who died similarly…

Ola Tunander: I tried to think about if there was anyone, who has been active in a central position pursuing dialogue with Moscow, that has not been shot. And then I couldn't think of anyone.

Mattias Forsgren: So when Olof Palme was killed, you might wonder what’s the first suspicion—and what’s the first lead to investigate thoroughly? There we see a big gaping hole.

You might also add Bernt Carlsson who died in the Lockerbie incident, and he might well have been an intended target. We’ve got Gough Whitlam who was Prime Minister in Australia who was removed when he opposed the Vietnam War. The list could be made very long.

Ola Tunander: Bernt Carlsson was on his way to negotiate in New York, in the UN. To be more precise, he had already negotiated with the South Africans and had lots of documents which the South Africans were not happy about. The South African delegation was supposed to travel on the same flight but then chose another one.

Gunnar Wall: The whole thing [concerning public debate about the possibility that the murder of Palme was a state crime] was given new life in 1995 when Kjell-Olof Feldt, who had been Minister of Finance in the Palme government, wrote an article in Dagens Nyheter [the biggest daily newspaper in Sweden] where he seriously raised the question whether there had been police involvement at a high level in the murder. Of course, it was a sensation when he made that statement. It dominated media coverage throughout the day.

But the next day it ended for a special reason, namely because the day after Ingvar Carlsson announced that he intended to resign as Prime Minister. That came out of the blue, not even his co-workers knew he was about to announce it. He hadn’t prepared a successor. It came quickly and intensively and instead became the big news. The result was that Feldt and his article fell out of the limelight altogether.

The Stay Behind lead got attention in 2015 when Inga-Britt Ahlenius published an article in Dagens Nyheter and put forward the question of possible Stay Behind involvement in the murder. She was not just anyone; she had been Director-General of the National Audit Office. She had been Under Secretary-General of the United Nations. She had been part of a group that scrutinized the European Commission and had forced it to resign. She was a member of a commission investigating the Palme inquiry. She was well-merited from a range of perspectives, and she raised the possibility that Stay Behind could have been involved in the murder of Olof Palme.

What we are talking about is a [secret paramilitary] structure created in Western Europe after the end of the Second World War at the initiative of NATO. It had roots in Sweden that were started in other ways, but Sweden was incorporated in this structure. It was particularly sensitive that there was a Stay Behind organization in Sweden because Sweden was not in NATO, but it was there, nonetheless.

In the final phase of the Palme Inquiry, then led by Christer Peterson, an attempt at a comprehensive investigation of Stay Behind’s possible involvement in the murder was undertaken, but they had to give up because those who had been part of Stay Behind and were heard said nothing. No papers could be produced from MUST (Swedish Military intelligence) or SÄPO (Swedish Security Service) about Stay Behind. It was a very difficult topic to investigate. Still, they spent a lot of time on it but eventually gave up.

Instead, they choose to name Stig Engström [as the murderer of Olof Palme]. They found Stig Engström interesting because they thought he had been involved with Stay Behind and had acted on their behalf, so it was part of the whole thing even from that perspective.

The situation today is that we don’t know who’s responsible for the murder. But it could have been some kind of secret structure acting on the night of the murder. If so, there were at least some part of that structure that performed the murder, even if other parts of it may not have been involved. Today this is a hypothesis that is very strong, I would say.

Ola Tunander: On Gunnar Wall's blog there was an article by a man called Lindquist who wrote, quoting a SÄPO (Swedish Security Service) document which was a SÄPO assessment that found that there was a Stay Behind exercise going on that evening. Within the framework of this counter-coup exercise some actors had acted in a live operation and thus executed the Prime Minister instead of role playing in a mock assassination.

In some UK documents, it is said about the Nordic countries that they had become a bit frisky, a bit rowdy. They were not under control. These were documents from the Foreign Office and maybe some from Defense and they stated that what the Norwegians were doing meant they were on a slippery slope, and that the Swedes were even worse, and that one would have to talk seriously with the Norwegians. What to do with the Swedes was not stated.

Concerning the many different leads [in the Palme investigation]: When the Americans tried to assassinate Fidel Castro, they had several groups working to assassinate him. When they planned to liquidate René Schneider, the commander-in-chief of [president] Allende, they had two groups.

The advantage of having several groups in this way is firstly, that it increases the chances of success because at least one of these groups will probably succeed, and secondly, every investigation will be almost impossible, because all clues point in different directions.

Mattias Forsgren: So, when we look at the background of this type of murders, we see that from a historical perspective one might almost have expected that Palme would be killed by these networks. And if we look at the investigation in Sweden, we see that precisely those leads pointing in that direction have been carefully avoided and never thoroughly investigated. Except, you might say, by Christer Peterson, who tried to take a closer look at it, but was then met by a wall of resistance from those he tried to investigate.

And on the topic of how one might imagine the murder was carried out: You’ve given a description of how these kinds of exercises are used as an opportunity to carry out this type of attack. We’ll return to other examples of this.

But before that, let’s look at the actual murder scene – all the testimonies that point to just such a scenario. If you look for a modus operandi of this murder you see precisely this type of observation concerning surveillance, men with walkie-talkies. SÄPO did its own investigation that showed that Palme was under surveillance from the day before the murder up to when he was shot. Probably also during the preceding month, but definitely during the day before. And that report was classified for a long time.

Ola Tunander: Well, actually all this concerning anti-coup exercises is actually typical in all such sensitive cases. You often have an exercise and inside the exercise you have a live operation.

When it comes to planning of coups, and anti-coup planning, like what was done here, you may go back to the Lorenzo coup in Italy 1964, where they used a plan called Piano Solo which should have been used against a coup, but which was used to carry one out. This was successful and led to the Socialist Party not being able to form government and so there was no real need to continue the coup.

In Greece in -67 they had the Prometheus plan, which was also such an anti-coup plan that was used to carry out a coup – that is the fascist coup of 1967. That's how you do it, so to speak.

There was a perception in the navy that it was Olof Palme that gave orders to released Russian submarines [which the Swedish navy hunted in the Stockholm Archipelago in the early -80’s]. I’ve met people in the navy who have said they believed that.

Now it has been well established, you can see the orders that were given, that there were a couple of admirals who let these submarines out, and that they were not Russian. Rather, they were probably British submarines. That meant that there was a motive, an extremely strong motive, because Olof Palme was made out to look like a traitor who collaborated with the Russians.

There was a peace movement that was incredibly strong, but then over three years with these submarines the perception of Russia changed from 25 to 30 per cent perceiving Russia as hostile or a direct threat, to 83%. In this perceived enormous threat that emerged, Olof Palme came to represent the enemy.

Actually, it was only people on lower levels, the foot soldiers, who believed that it was Russian submarines, and that it was because of this that you had to get rid of Palme. But the real reason was the need to have control over Swedish air bases. I think that was crucial.

Henrik Petersen: The Palme Commission was really about disarmament, and there were very, very influential political names and [Palme] had by then become a truly symbolic figure for what in Germany is called Ostpolitik. It is a concept that feels almost taboo in Sweden today. Talking about Ostpolitik and Palme is in fact something we don't do. It was about trying to promote democracy in the East through diplomacy, diplomatic dialogue and cooperation. And that's the background of Palme's scheduled visit to Moscow in April 1986 where he would talk to Gorbachev.

Mattias Forsgren: If we suppose that the murder of Olof Palme was a successful murder that some found necessary to commit, you might wonder what happened after it that would not have happened if Olof Palme had still been around. What we find is that those who took control, the forces that became dominant after the fall of the Soviet Union, were the corrupt oligarchs.

It’s easy to see that Russia was already infiltrated and that there was a plan on how to deal with Russia and the former Soviet republics after what was then perceived as the strategic victory over the Soviet Union. Dick Cheney said that after the Soviet Union had been dissolved, the dissolution of Russia would follow. [Palme’s peace plan could clearly have been seen as a threat to that development.]

And now you look at Russia, which has a third of all the world's natural resources, worth something like € 75 trillion. You’ve got an over-indebted West and many financiers who need something to capitalize, then the Russian natural resources and possibly some of its industry would provide the opportunity to revitalize this capitalist system again. Then Putin came and put a spanner in the works. And here we are, in a way, in the same situation again.

Ola Tunander: I would just like to say that this is correct. And it's important too, with the Moscow trip. I should have said that. There were quite a few people in central positions that claimed that was decisive. I went through some documents from the 90’s a few days ago, and then I found that I had written an article around the mid 90’s in Dagens Nyheter about exactly that. And there was an interview that Dagens Nyheter did with me on the topic of Palme’s trip to Moscow.

In fact, Gorbachev was strongly influenced by the Palme Commission. We have got that from Arbatov’s conversations with Egon Bar. Arbatov was close adviser to Gorbachev, and he was advisor to the previous ones too. So, there were clearly such concerns. And at that time there were lots of people talking about Gorbachev as if there was no difference between Gorbachev and Stalin. There was an idea that dictatorship is dictatorship, in short.

Gunnar Wall: Let me add one thing to that. The Review Commission, of which Inga-Britt Ahlenius was a member, did a major investigation of the Palme Inquiry in the 90’s, and they wrote that there was one motive that the Palme investigators had not mentioned at all, and the commission found that extremely remarkable, and that was [Palme’s planned] visit to Moscow.

Ola Tunander: What has been central to American thinking has been that Russia is an enemy. Above all they wanted to eliminate gas pipelines. Already from 1981 the will to eliminate gas pipelines was incredibly strong. They got rid of all the leading figures who wanted to cooperate with Moscow in Western politics.

You could say that when the Russians are an enemy the Europeans must lean on the Americans. Russia not being an enemy would mean that America, or the United States, would become a regular country, an economic power that is significant, but not having a hegemony over Europe. The ability of the United States to impose hegemony over Europe is based on the perception of Russia being a direct enemy. And thus, they’ve killed everyone that wanted a dialogue with the Russians, or that wanted to have a fixed link with the Russians as these gas pipelines are examples of.

Gunnar Wall: I would like to describe the initial years of the investigation by [chief investigator] Hans Holmér—and later Ebbe Carlsson’s contributions—as a cover-up with the support of Rosenbad [the Swedish state].

That may sound far out and hard to believe. One might ask if the government really had an interest in a cover-up, but then I think you ignore that cover-ups are something very common in political dealings. They happen all the time to a greater or lesser extent.

In this case, it has to do with the need to cover up Sweden's role internationally. It was not at all the case that Sweden was non-aligned, rather there was a secret co-operation with NATO. They were running a Stay Behind organization and things like that. This meant that they had engaged in cover-ups on key issues where it was not possible to inform the people of Sweden about what was really going on.

Naturally this meant that if the Palme murder was related to all of that, a cover-up was needed in that case too. Information about who had murdered Palme was not needed, the fact that it was a sensitive topic was sufficient reason not investigate it. Simultaneously, they had to provide an answer about who killed Palme. It wasn’t possible to just say that it’s a secret not to be dealt with. They had to present an acceptable answer to prevent the investigation of such things which were inappropriate to investigate.

What is clear is that when prime minister Ingvar Carlsson acted on this issue, his behavior was in line with what he had done during previous phases of the Palme investigation. Ingvar Carlsson had ensured that it was Holmér, who was the chief investigator in the crucial first year. I propose that Ingvar Carlsson was centrally involved in the Ebbe Carlsson affair, which concerned the revival of the PKK lead behind the backs of the prosecutors and chief investigators, with the active support of the government (Editor’s note: see this for a summary of the PKK angle).

This has given me, and others, reason to consider whether people in the government were very keen to quickly bring about a closure of the investigation, to get an official answer, so that people would stop asking questions. This gets even clearer when you look at the statements from Ingvar Carlsson himself, and from others, which indicates that he, just after the murder, was worried that it had been a major attack against the Swedish society, and not just an act of a single perpetrator. To my mind Ingvar Carlsson became so worried about the implications of the murder that he concluded that it was not possible to have an unbiased investigation of it, and that he strongly contemplated whether there were people in different government structures who could be involved in it.

Mattias Forsgren: Gunnar, do you remember the quote of what Ingvar Carlsson said? It was something along the lines of, “I suppose it's all for the best if it was a lone killer now that things are the way they are.” Something like that. Do you remember?

Gunnar Wall: He said something similar. I don't have the verbatim quotes here. But concerning Ingvar Carlsson, one might add that he backed Holmér and Ebbe Carlsson when they worked on the PKK lead, but when Pettersson was charged and convicted [but later freed] for the murder, Ingvar Carlsson strongly endorsed that as the probable truth. So, he has been very keen to come up with an answer that could be acceptable. It is strange that a prime minister, who was Palme's successor and close friend had no greater interest of a more comprehensive investigation of the murder.

Arne Ruth (Audience member and chief editor of Dagens Nyheter, 1982 – 1998): How do you see the role of the media in all of this? The role of the media is to dispel cover-ups, at least to their own minds. That is the core of the journalistic profession, but how has the media actually affected the interpretation of this?

Ola Tunander: Since you left the position of editor-in-chief at Dagens Nyheter things have gone downhill. That’s safe to say. It is actually bad. What has happened over the last 20 years is that there has been a streamlining. Over the last ten years it has gotten even worse and the last five years have been a disaster. Now you can hardly say anything at all.

(Initial translation and editing by Mattias Forsgren)

Editor’s note: click on the image below to hear Ola Tunander being interviewed (in English) by Aaron Good on the American Exception podcast, Episode 146: Sweden, NATO, and Olaf Palme.