The Palme Assassination – 40 Years of Cover-up
The murder of Olof Palme was, without doubt, one of the most shocking events in Sweden during the last century, and the subsequent police investigation—the world’s most expensive one—can only be regarded as a monumental failure. Despite the attempts by the police and prosecutors to solve the murder by securing the conviction of a lone perpetrator the murder still today remains unsolved, and the question is whether the truth about it will ever reach the public.
The third of the government‑appointed commissions, the so‑called Review Commission (Granskningskommissionen), although broadly seeming to agree with the Palme investigation’s conclusions, nevertheless directed criticism at the neglect of international tracks, among which the Bofors [Swedish arms manufacturer] affair can be counted.
Hans Holmér, the first head of the investigation, who in early 1987 was forced to resign with great fanfare after his failed attempt to connect the Kurdish political party PKK to the deed, once declared that “if the truth about the murder of Olof Palme comes out, it will shake Sweden to its foundations”—a statement that sits ill with his 95‑percent certainty of PKK’s guilt and, for that matter, even less with the stubborn insistence on a lone assassin.
If, instead, the truth lies on another level—that the murder was planned and carried out by powerful forces, both in Sweden and abroad, and that the investigation itself was deliberately driven onto false trails for the purpose of a cover‑up, done with the blessing of Sweden’s tracking authorities—then the former county police commissioner’s statement takes on an entirely different complexion. Were something of that kind to become public knowledge, it would indeed trigger a gigantic scandal with tremendous repercussions for reputation of Sweden’s rule‑of‑law system as a whole.
Another high dignitary, former Minister of Justice and Ambassador to Paris Carl Lidbom, is said to have remarked that “it would be best if the murder of Olof Palme were never solved.”
This prompts the question of what might be of such gravity that a cover‑up would constitute the best solution?
Here I will present an attempt at a solution consisting of a number of indications and factual details suggesting that the murder may have been initiated by individuals high up in the power hierarchy. This theory is diametrically opposed to the official Palme investigation’s, as it can be said to culminate in the hypothesis that Palme fell victim to a grand‑political conspiracy—one with the power both to carry out such a deed and then to conceal the truth about it.
George H.W. Bush and the Operations Sub‑Group (OSG)
In a radio interview in Los Angeles on 14 July 1997, the defected CIA agent Gene “Chip” Tatum revealed that a special group, created by the then U.S. Vice President and later President George H.W. Bush, was—among several other misdeeds—behind the murder of the Swedish Prime Minister. The motive, according to Tatum, was that Palme, who was also the UN’s peace mediator in the Iran–Iraq War, had intervened against the international arms cartels and thereby prevented them from using what he called “the Bofors route” to sell American weapons to permitted countries for onward transfer to Iran during the war with Iraq. In the interview, Tatum further asserted that the OSG commissioned South African agents to carry out the assassination.
Thus two international tracks converge here with the Bofors track. But how much substance is there to this? It is known that Palme on several occasions intervened directly against Bofors and halted certain arms shipments that had Iran as the final destination. It is claimed, for example, that it was Palme who ensured that, on 29 September 1985, the customs crime unit raided the Malmö office of the arms dealer Karl‑Erik Schmitz, where thousands of documents were seized, showing in detail how the international arms and explosives cartel operated on both sides of the Iron Curtain—not least through a country like the GDR, which financed a large part of its state budget through arms smuggling organized by the security service STASI. Bofors played an important role here, not least through Schmitz, who, according to certain reliable sources, has been identified as a CIA collaborator with a direct line to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North—the man who later was sacrificed when the Iran–Contra affair began to unravel in late 1986.
At the National Security Archive in Washington, it is possible to read what Oliver North wrote in his diary, which points to that Palme had interferred and blocked the sale of arms equipment aimed for Iran. On 11 March 1986, some days after the killing, he wrote that everything now was ready for shipment. North made use of the Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar and the Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres’s envoy, Amiram Nir as intermediaries:
“Call from Nir. G[h]orba[nifar] wants Nir to bring items with him to Sweden. (...) After February [after the Palme murder] all things are possible.”
During 1985–86, North had attempted to smuggle Hawk missiles via Sweden to Iran, and in the years preceding 1985, Bofors had developed a channel for exporting Swedish weapons to Iran — a route that North was able to exploit.
According to Tatum, Palme threatened to go to the UN and reveal everything he knew about the United States’ illegal arms dealings with the regime in Iran, and with the Contras resistance movement in Nicaragua. Tatum, who at that time reportedly lived at an undisclosed location together with his wife, is supposed to have placed confidential CIA documents as a kind of life insurance in case anything should happen to him.
Gene Tatum was transferred from the CIA to the OSG (Operations Sub‑Groups) in April 1986 and there he learned about various shady covert operations the OSG had carried out. The OSG was part of an organization that reported directly to the National Security Council and the Office of the Vice President in the United States. President Ronald Reagan had, in December 1981, signed a decree—Executive Order 12133—which came to entail the creation of a structure consisting of a number of groups such as the Special Situations Group and the Crisis Management Group, whose primary tasks were to handle intelligence, counter‑espionage, and various types of secret operations requiring rapid and efficient decision‑making. This organization, which has subsequently been called “the secret government of the United States” and which in February 1986 was merged with the OSG, could thus bypass normal bureaucratic channels and make use of personnel from ordinary agencies, including the NSC and the CIA. These individuals did not have to report to their regular employers, but directly to the OSG and to the vice president Bush.
There is also some information indicating that part of the arms trade was financed with narcotics from Latin America as payment— something that caused great outrage after a revelatory series of articles in a California newspaper in the autumn of 1996, in which the CIA was accused of having controlled the narcotics trade in the United States during much of the 1980s.
It has also been suspected that Bofors’ major India deal, worth more than 8 billion kronor, may have had something to do with the Palme murder. What Bofors director Martin Ardbo meant when he wrote in his diary that “Palme’s involvement could track to the fall of Sweden’s government” is a secret he said he took to the grave.
The Telegram Track
At a fairly early stage of the Palme investigation, a telegram came to light with the following wording: “Tell our friend that the Swedish tree will be felled.” This telegram, allegedly sent only three days before the murder of Olof Palme, was from Licio Gelli, the notorious Grand Master of the Italian Masonic lodge P2, and was addressed to Philip Guarino, a senior official of the U.S. Republican Party and a close confidant of George Bush Sr. According to a later account, Bush was mentioned by name as “our friend” in the telegram, which is believed to have referred to the impending murder in Stockholm; the Swedish tree would have been Olof Palme, whose name was often perceived as “Palm.”
That Licio Gelli had good contacts with the Reagan/Bush administration is evident not least from his being invited to those gentlemen’s inauguration at the White House in December 1981.
The source of the telegram track was the CIA agent “Ibrahim Razin,” who, by all accounts, is identical with the CIA’s Iran expert Oscar LeWinter.
One journalist in Sweden who took an interest in this telegram was the daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter’s Olle Alsén. In early 1990, he phoned the addressee Philip Guarino, who replied that he remembered nothing about it. The Palme group also requested material from the FBI, which, according to former chief investigator Hans Ölvebro, led to “Razin” being dismissed as “an international fraudster,” whereupon the telegram track was no longer of interest.
“Operation Tree” has, incidentally, appeared in another closely related context—namely as the codename for the murder. This information comes from a journalist named Allan Francovich, who claimed even to have the name of Palme’s killer: a professional assassin who had been employed by the former Iranian security service and trained by the CIA. His thesis was that the murder had been ordered by a secret organization within NATO: the Special Operations Planning Staff (SOPS), a sub-branch of the Allied Clandestine Committee (ACC) which coordinated the stay-behind networks in Europe. NATO’s secret stay-behind armies were trained for both resistance against Soviet invasions and domestic “emergencies.” This raises the possibility that such networks could have been activated for political purposes, including assassinations.
At the ACC/SOPS meetings, there was also a representative from the CIA for NATO’s ITAC (Intelligence Tactical Assessment Center — subordinated to U.S. intelligence and playing a central role within Stay Behind), who is said to have leaked the report classified as “Cosmic Top Secret,” dated 7 January 1986.
Francovich planned to meet the hitman during his stay in the United States, but suddenly died in April 1997 of a heart attack after passing through customs at Houston Airport in Texas. According to his account, Operation Tree had been planned by a secret group within NATO, which intended at all costs to prevent Palme’s forthcoming trip to Moscow, where topics such as a Nordic nuclear‑weapon‑free zone were to be discussed as well as, reportedly, the question of Norway’s and Denmark’s withdrawal from NATO. This implied that Palme was considered a threat to NATO’s northern flank.
The exposure of the Italian Masonic lodge P2 (Propaganda Due) in the early 1980s struck like a bomb in Italy, when it emerged that a large number of high‑ranking politicians and military officers were members. P2 has also been linked to several criminal activities in Europe during the 1970s and 1980s as part of a “strategy of tension”, including the kidnapping and murder of politician Aldo Moro in 1977 and the bombing of the Bologna railway station in 1980, in which 85 people were killed. The person chiefly responsible for this deed was Stefano Delle Chiaie, who has also figured in the Palme case: his lawyer is said to have revealed to a journalist that Delle Chiaie had admitted that he was in some way also involved in the murder of the Swedish Prime Minister. Delle Chiaie was actually visited in prison in Florence by an officer from the Palme group, but at that time he would not concede any involvement whatsoever.
The South Africa Track
Another person with allegedly strong ties to P2 is a man named Giovanni Mario Ricci, who in this context is of interest not only because he, like the CIA chief William Casey, was a member of the Knights of Malta, but primarily because of his connections to Craig Williamson—the South African “super‑spy” whom a number of South African agents have identified as the very mastermind behind the Palme murder.
Craig Williamson was recruited in the early 1970s to South Africa’s security police and took part—by his own admission—in several operations both in South Africa and abroad against tracking figures within the ANC. In 1985 he moved to military intelligence and worked through a number of private companies, including Longreach Ltd, that functioned as a cover for various types of covert activities. Among Williamson’s business partners—perhaps the most important one—was none other than Giovanni Mario Ricci. They cooperated both in Longreach and in a company that, after Ricci’s initials, was called GMR, and Williamson was at some point in 1986 appointed managing director of its South African branch.
The South Africa track in the Palme investigation received much attention at the end of September 1996, after Police Colonel Eugene de Kock testified in a Pretoria court about his involvement in the crimes of the apartheid regime and, just in passing, stated that Craig Williamson had organized the murder of Olof Palme as part of “Operation Longreach,” something he claimed to have first‑hand knowledge of. The former agent Riian Stander, who also had been employed by Longreach, has also told the Swedish film maker Boris Ersson that the Palme murder was carried out by people from the military security service, and that Craig Williamson organized he operation with the codename “Hammer”. He also informed that the South African elite soldiers Anthony White and Paul Asmussen got support from local people in Sweden who worked in a police squad with a female boss.
Tips about South African involvement had reached the Palme investigation already in its first month. Karl‑Gunnar Bäck, who later became head of Sweden’s Civil Defence Association, has, for example, stated that he had contact with an Englishman who told him that the British intelligence service MI6 had information about the murder: it was South African security agents who were behind it, and a Swedish police officer employed by the Swedish security service Säpo should also have been involved.
Bäck recorded this on a cassette tape, which he then sent to Säpo in Uppsala, but no one contacted him until late summer 1986, when he was told that the track had been investigated but had not led anywhere. Bäck was surprised, since no one had been in touch with him to ask for the source’s name. It later emerged that the tape had disappeared and thus never reached the police’s Palme unit.
Craig Williamson was not an unknown name to the Palme group either; already in March 1986 they received information from a highly credible source about Williamson’s possible involvement and that there was a Swedish connection. It is also known that Williamson was in Stockholm during the anti‑apartheid conference on 21–23 February 1986, where Palme vehemently condemned the apartheid system. That Williamson remained in Stockholm on the night of the murder has has likewise been confirmed by the Palme prosecutor Jan Danielsson. Williamson should have stayed in a guest apartment on Kammakargatan in central Stockholm that was used by the International Police Association (IPA).
Another central figure within Longreach was Peter Casselton, who, a day before he was to give his testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, was crushed to death by a truck he was repairing in his garage.
Following de Kock’s sensational revelation, several perpetrators have been named, above all the abovementioned Anthony White, who also worked within Longreach.
Another one is the Swede Bertil Wedin, who in the early 1980s was recruited by Williamson to the South African security service. He had a military background. In addition, he is alleged to have been an informant for both Säpo and the Turkish security service MIT. Since 1985 he lived in Cyprus until his death in 2022 . He described these accusations as “madness,” but in an article for the righ-wing magazine Contra he wrote that there was another person, besides Palme, who was to be murdered that evening—namely himself: “The idea was that I would appear to be the murderer, but that it would never be known whether I had committed suicide or been killed by accomplices. The reason the plan did not come to fruition was that I never came to Stockholm but stayed in Cyprus.”
There is also another type of suspicion directed at Wedin—namely, that he was the one who planted the PKK track with a journalist at the Turkish paper Hürriyet three months before the first head of the Palme investigation Hans Holmér went public with his so called main track. PKK’s threats against Palme were at the front page of the tabloid newspaper Expressen in the autumn of 1985, which interviewed Säpo’s Alf Karlsson, by the same person that was responsible for Palme’s bodyguard protection. In spite of this threath to his person, Palme had no bodyguards when he was shot.
One of the more interesting sources in South Africa is the former soldier and security agent Brian Davies, who claimed to have a good deal of first‑hand information. He told a radio journalist that the motive was not political—i.e., Palme’s fierce opposition to the apartheid regime—but financial, concerning international arms smuggling. According to Davies, Williamson led the operation, Anthony White handled logistics, and the killer was a Turk who belonged to the PKK. Davies also said there was a clear link to the aforementioned company GMR, which is said to have made large profits from arms smuggling. It is important to remember that South Africa was a hub for much of the illegal arms trade to Iran, Afghanistan, and to the various wars in Africa. The arms dealer Karl‑Erik Schmitz supplied Iran during the Iran–Iraq War with explosives from both South Africa’s Armscor and Sweden’s Bofors.
If we return to Stockholm on the night of the murder, there are not so many known witness statements that point to this track. Perhaps the most interesting testimony came from an anonymous witness, “the Skelleftehamn man”, who overheard a walkie‑talkie conversation in a foreign language similar to German shortly before the murder and not far from the crime scene.
There are also some peripheral observation of three foreign men driving around and camping in a white VW van. Some observers believe they may have been part of a commando team on the night of the murder.
It could also be interesting is to point out certain peculiar circumstances surrounding a certain Heine Hüman, a Swede of South African origin, who during the relevant period lived in Björklinge near Uppsala, where he had a car repair shop. Fourteen minutes after the murder, a couple in the Stockholm suburb Bromma received a mysterious telephone call with the words: “It’s done. Palme has been shot.” Obviously wrong number. But it has, however, emerged that their telephone number was almost identical to the Uppsala number—differing only in the area code—to a clubhouse located very close to Hüman’s residence in Björklinge. Sometime in 1988 Hüman abruptly disappeared from the country without even saying goodbye to his neighbours.
Another man with connections to both Sweden and the South African security service is Nigel Barnett. In the spring of 1997 he was questioned by Swedish police in Mozambique, where he had been detained since March that year on suspicion of arms smuggling. Information about Barnett’s possible involvement in the Palme murder comes from former business associate Richard Sears, who, shortly after Barnett’s arrest, found a bag with a strange contents in his car. In it were, in addition to three different identity cards for him, a tape recording from Radio Sweden, Stockholm, in which two Finnish women related that they had seen a man speaking Finnish into a walkie‑talkie outside the Dekorima shop very close to the crime scene shortly before the murder. It has not been confirmed if Barnett was in Sweden at that time.
There are also reports that two named professional assassins from the Chilean security service DINA were in Stockholm at the time of the murder, specifically from 26 February to 4 March. Whether their stay in Sweden had anything to do with the murder is uncertain, but if so, one need not ignore the indications pointing toward South Africa. It is known that during the relevant period there was a kind of affinity between the security services of Chile and South Africa. The head of DINA’s assassination unit, Pedro Espinoza, for example, was active in Pretoria between 1985 and 1987, where he helped organize various types of operations together with his South African colleagues. Furthermore, there should be links from Craig Williamson to the professional assassin Michael Townley, a former agent of DINA, who himself told police interrogators that he had received the order to murder Palme in Madrid as early as 1975.
World Anti‑Communist League
An organization often mentioned in this context is WACL (World Anti‑Communist League). WACL began in the early 1960s with Taiwan and South Korea as tracking forces. During the 1970s, after having vigorously supported the U.S. war efforts in Vietnam, several groups were built up, primarily among Eastern Europeans in exile and Latin Americans. Among the member organizations we also find the successor to the Croatian Ustaša, which, incidentally, was mentioned on the very night of the murder at the hospital by Olof Palme’s wife Lisbet (she stated that she had seen two perpetrators, which also went out in the police’s heavily delayed nationwide alert. At that time, WACL represented the Reagan administration’s interests in Latin America during the 1980s, primarily through its support to the Contras in Nicaragua. In November, U.S. politician Alan Cranston received a letter from an inmate in a California prison. It stated that it was WACL that had planned the murder of the Swedish Prime Minister. Cranston forwarded the letter via the U.S. State Department to the Swedish Embassy in Washington, but it disappeared somewhere along the way and never reached the Palme investigation.
WACL was also represented in Stockholm in a building owned by the Baltic Association on Wallingatan, which also the International Police Association (IPA) had access to. It was there Craig Williamson is supposed to have stayed in the night Palme was killed. One of the police officers who appear in the so‑called police track are also said to have had close ties to WACL, which also applies to a psychology lecturer at the Police Academy, who during the 1980s was also chairman of the Sweden–South Africa Association.
The South African Deepsearch Report
In recent years, beginning in 2014, the former diplomat and SIDA (Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency) official Göran Björkdahl—who had previously investigated the circumstances surrounding the death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961—turned his attention to the Palme case. He held meetings with members of the military, police officers, and security service personnel in South Africa. In June 2014, a general told him that he considered several central documents Björkdahl presented to be authentic and said he was convinced that South Africa was behind the Palme assassination. These documents are included in the so called “Deepsearch” report. A key document is what appears to be a State Security Council intelligence report, which designated Palme an “enemy of the state’” thereby becoming a legitimate assassination target. The Deepsearch report, prepared by a former General in the South African military intelligence, includes a list of individuals who may have been involved in the decision making, planning, and execution of the operation.
In 2015, Björkdahl met a serving General in the covert part of the military intelligence and the General confirmed that South Africa(ns) killed Olof Palme. He also asked Björkdahl to inform Swedish intelligence that the South African military intelligence was willing to assist in bringing out the truth about the assassination. Björkdahl handed over the information to the Swedish Security Services, Säpo, in November 2015 and got no feedback thereafter.
After a series of meetings with various individuals in South Africa and Sweden — including several meetings with the Swedish Palme investigation, information surfaced about an alleged secret meeting on 18 March 2020 between a Swedish delegation and South Africa’s State Security Agency. Björkdahl was told by a credible intelligence source in South Africa that authorities in both Sweden and South Africa were intent on preventing the truth from coming out, regardless of the fact that South Africa is a different state today than during the apartheid era.
Instead of pursuing the South Africa track, Chief Prosecutor Krister Petersson decided to close the entire investigation, arguing that the main suspect — a graphic designer at the insurance company Skandia, Stig Engström, the “Skandia man”, presumed to have acted alone — had passed away.
This decision was later rejected by Senior Prosecutor Lennart Guné, who concluded that the evidence against Stig Engström was insufficient, without reopening the criminal case.
The South African Connection to the Police Track
For a foreign commando group to manage to carry out this kind of operation in a foreign country, strong local support is surely indispensable—that is, from people with good local knowledge who can take care of logistics, reconnaissance, surveillance, and the removal of traces. It is natural to assume that these are people with military or police backgrounds. As mentioned above the former agent Riian Stander informed that the hit-team got support from local people in Sweden who worked in a police squad with a female boss.
There is another noteworthy connection between Swedish police officers and South Africa, stemming from the fact that several officers from the Norrmalm police district in Stockholm made private trips to South Africa in the mid‑1980s. This led to an internal investigation that also examined the presence of right‑wing extremism within the police force, with particular focus on that very district.
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The officers in question were invited to South Africa by the International Police Association (IPA) at a time when most international organizations were officially boycotting that country. In October 1996, some investigative journalists tried to obtain IPA’s guestbooks for the relevant period, but unfortunately it turned out that all the guestbooks had been destroyed. The only registers that remained were from after 1989.
In the tabloid Expressen in October 1996, during the peak of the South African revelations, silhouettes of no fewer than ten Swedes—mostly police officers—who had travelled privately to South Africa were published. Among them were the arms dealer and former Norrmalm police officer Carl‑Gustaf Östling, along with his fellow arms dealer, Major Grundborg. It may be worthwhile to elaborate on Östling, who has often been regarded as a pivotal figure in the Palme case.
During a search of Östling’s home by the customs crime unit in connection with the so‑called Ebbe Carlsson affair, documents were found showing that his company had conducted business with several South African firms. In the subsequent trial, Östling confirmed that he had listed the South African Legation in Stockholm as the client for a particular type of equipment. Investigators also found a large quantity of weapons and ammunition, including Winchester Magnum Metal Piercing rounds—the same rare brand as the two bullets recovered from the crime scene—as well as maps of Stockholm’s telephone network and photographs showing Östling giving Hitler salutes at various locations in Europe.
It was none other than Östling who procured the surveillance equipment ordered by private investigator Ebbe Carlsson, who was working in tandem with the dismissed head of the Palme investigation, Hans Holmér, to contiune with the PKK track. The equipment was subsequently seized by customs in Helsingborg in June 1988 — the starting point of a major national scandal.
It is also often mentioned in this context that Östling and his colleague had access to premises on David Bagares gata, along the killer’s escape route, and that Östling, against doctors’ advice, left the hospital Södersjukhuset, where he had been hospitalized for an appendectomy, on the night of the murder.
Returning to the Expressen article from October 1996, it stated the following about the other police officers who had visited South Africa and taken part in joint exercises with South African police forces::
38‑year‑old police officer… In the early 1980s he belonged to [the police squad] the Baseball League.” Worked inside duty and coordinated operations on the night Palme was murdered.
The right‑wing extremist. The person who built up the group within the Stockholm police. Helped to found [the right-wing] Demokratisk Allians in 1967.
The police inspector. Organized fascist meetings in the early 1980s… On the night of the murder he phoned a superior at the Norrmalm police and shouted: “At last! Now the bastard is dead!”
55‑year‑old police officer. A superior who, the day after the murder, raised a toast to the murder together with colleagues on the A‑shift at the Norrmalm police.
40‑year‑old police officer. Member of the Baseball League. Three witnesses stated that they saw him near the crime scene… His partner is the only person who provides him with an alibi.
39‑year‑old police officer. Member of the Baseball League. Seen boarding bus 43 at [the street] Eriksbergsgatan shortly after the murder. In his home in 1987 several Nazi symbols were found. Lacks an alibi.
Comment: This was in connection with a water leak in his apartment in the Stockholm suburb Traneberg, when what some believe to have been surveillance equipment was also discovered in a cupboard.
Furthermore:
37‑year‑old police officer. Has his background in the Baseball League. Avowed right‑wing extremist. Driver of patrol car 1520, seen on David Bagares gata shortly after the murder.
The police commissioner. Superior in patrol car 1520. Meets a witness and learns the direction in which the killer ran. Fails to pass the information on to the command center.
43‑year‑old police officer. Before the murder he is located only a few hundred meters from the crime scene. The reason is said to be that one of the officers was going to move his incorrectly parked car.
40‑year‑old police officer. States that he moved his incorrectly parked car. Had access to an address on Regeringsgatan, at the corner of David Bagares gata. Joined the pursuit of the killer…
Comment: The last four police officers belonged to two of the three police units whose activities, in various ways, seem peculiar—especially if police commissioner Gösta Söderström’s time indications are correct. Söderström, who was in charge of the initial investigations at the crime scene, has claimed that these three police vehicles received targeted alerts from the command center and thus got information of the murder up to six minutes before the area‑wide alert was sent out to all police vehicles in the city.
The police commissioner in 1520 has said that after the alert they turned into the streets Regeringsgatan and David Bagares gata to “block the killer’s escape route,” even though at that time they could not know which direction he had taken.
The police van 3230 from the district of Södermalm, 3230, thus left its own district to repark a car on a parallel street where they were when the shots were fired down on Sveavägen. After the alert they went directly to the crime scene, arriving ten seconds after the Söderström’s car 2520, after which they began the chase after the killer.
Another, perhaps troublesome, circumstance is that their colleague, ordinarily serving in this tactical unit, was temporarily working at the command center at the time of the murder and was the operator who received the first alert about the incident from Järfälla Taxi and who, through various omissions, delayed the alert and subsequently gave the assassin far too great a head start. Contrary to regulations, for example, he terminated the call with Järfälla Taxi and did not call an ambulance.
It can be added that this investigative article was never followed up by Swedish mainstream medias. The lid was put on!
A Top-secret Stay-behind Operation in Stockholm?
One can ask whether all this is pure coincidence or whether there is any substance to the information presented in this essay. According to the former Palme prosecutor Jan Danielsson, there is nothing to indicate that there was any kind of conspiracy. This assessment disregards the numerous observations – about 80 — from people who have seen men talking on walkie‑talkies in the relevant evening. A closer study of these reveals that they form a pattern that coincides with the Palmes’ walk from their home in the Old Town, their metro ride to the station Rådmansgatan, and then their walk to and from the GRAND cinema on Sveavägen.
In this context, it should be pointed out, that a special investigative unit within the Swedish Security Service (Säpo) had already concluded in April 1986 that Palme had been under surveillance both before and during the night of the murder. The Säpo group had reviewed more than 1,000 witness interviews, which led to a final report was not registered in the Palme investigation until 1989. The investigation’s chief, Hans Ölvebro—who attempted to have a drug addict convicted of the murder—used to dismiss all witness statements describing men with walkie‑talkies as ‘pure fantasies’.
In recent years, however, it has emerged that on the evening of 28 February 1986, an exercise simulating a coup attempt was carried out in central Stockholm under police and military command — something that has never been officially confirmed.
A dress rehearsal for this exercise is said to have been tested in great secrecy a few years earlier, together with (among others) police officers from the police district of Norrmalm in Central Stockholm.
The covert military exercise, named “Exercise Gustaf”, started in the week of the murder, 24–28 February 1986, on the island of Gotland, involving paratroopers from the military base of Karlsborg. The exercise scenario involved the elimination of key Swedish information‑carriers in the event of a foreign occupation. At midday on Friday 28 February, the participants left Gotland and flew to Stockholm. It remains unclear how these men travelled home from Stockholm.
One version holds that they were flown from Arlanda to Såtenäs aboard one of the armed forces’ aircrafts. In the War Archives, documentation is kept for all military flights of that kind.
But for 1986, all sheets are present — except one: the sheet covering 27 February to 2 March is missing!
There is also a report by Tore Forsberg, who in 1986 was the head of the counter‑espionage unit’s Russia section, that there was an operation called “Cosi fan tutte” that took place on 28 February 1986 — the very night Olof Palme was murdered. What this operation actually was about is still rather unclear. One line of inquiry concerns the Stay Behind organization, i.e. the secret army linked to NATO, and the so‑called Barbro Group — which, according to witness statements, conducted a surveillance operation in central Stockholm on the night of the murder.
The Barbro Group was reportedly led by a woman. It is possible that she was the person whom the agent Riian Stander mentioned as the tracker of a police squad that assisted the hit team.
Was it really a coincidence that these covert operations unfolded on the very night Olof Palme was assassinated, or is it conceivable that the elimination of the prime minister was an exercise scenario that a hit team decided to execute for real?
Concluding Remarks
A frequently raised objection to the idea of a conspiracy involving many participants is that at least one of them would be tempted by the 50‑million‑krona reward and leak information to the police or the media. This assumes, however, that a perpetrator would actually be convicted in a court of law, and that the official Palme investigation was led by competent individuals with a genuine intention of uncovering the truth. Anyone who nevertheless dared to break their vow of silence would far more likely be putting their own life in danger.
The Palme assassination is not unique. History shows many examples of political murders that were the result of some form of conspiracy. And if one examines the murky Iran–Contra affair more closely, one finds a series of other strange deaths—arms dealers, politicians, and others—that can be associated with it. At least two of these occurred in Sweden: the young journalist Cats Falck, who believed she was about to receive the grand journalism prize for her yet‑unpublished reports on arms smuggling before she, together with her friend, in 1984 drowned in a car that slid of the edge of the quay in the Hammarby harbour; and the arms‑control inspector Carl Fredrik Algernon, who was on his way to testify in the Bofors investigation, but who is alleged to have taken his own life by jumping in front of an incoming metro train in January 1987.
There are thus several international tracks in the Palme investigation, as well as several conceivable motives and perpetrators. In some cases, it could presumably be a matter of disinformation or deliberately planted false trails. All this can interact in various ways—but need not do so. By its nature, it is very difficult to have this type of information confirmed, which makes it hard to prove anything.
Therefore, in connection with the 40th anniversary of the assassination, a network called Palmemordet 40 has been working to mobilize public support for a truth commission with a strong mandate to question individuals under oath and to access the previously sealed archives of the state intelligence services. An appeal, which continues to gain new signatories, is available in English (as well as several other languages) under the title Palme assassination 40 years – Appeal about a Truth Commission.
The appeal has been submitted to both Parliament and the Government.
I do not claim that all the information I have presented in this extensive has anything to do with the Palme murder. But if, for example, it were true that it was ordered at the highest level in the world’s most powerful nation, one understands the impossibility of the Palme group’s task. Still, we must hope that sooner or later we will get the final answer. Until then, I consider this attempt at a solution—that is, the hypothesis of a grand‑political conspiracy, concealed in what might be called “the national interest”—to be more reasonable than the theory that the country’s Prime Minister fell victim to a lone madman.