In the wake of the end of the Second World War, Sweden's counterespionage went through turbulent times. The secret security service, the Allm & auml;nna s & auml;kerhetstj & auml;nsten, in operation since 1939, was dissolved and replaced by a new organizational structure involving the Swedish State Police, or more precisely, its Third Department, and the local Police organizations of the Communes. Although deprived of one of its most important sources of intelligence - the intelligence retrieved through the interception of mail, telegrams and telephone lines carried out under the aegis of the Allm & auml;nna s & auml;kerhetstj & auml;nsten - the Stockholm Criminal Police, in charge of counterespionage in relation to the Soviet Legation in Stockholm, remained in operation. On the basis of a review of the documents generated by the Police Officers commissioned with the arduous work of following and recording the activities of Soviet officials - newly declassified material that has not been the subject of research before - this study addresses the conditions under which this work was carried out, and its results in terms of intelligence and knowledge, in the years 1945-1955.

Based on a review of the correspondence between Swedish diplomats in the Baltic States and the Swedish Foreign Ministry for the years 1938–1940, the purpose of this article is, firstly, to elaborate a framework for the analysis of intelligence reporting in times of crisis, secondly, to investigate how the Swedish diplomats in the Baltic States went about to report intelligence, and thirdly, to try to reconstruct how the Swedes coped with the volatile conditions characteristic of these years. The article concludes that the period can be divided into four phases, each marked by their respective conditions for intelligence reporting, and that despite shifts to the Swedes' access to different types of sources, they were still able to compensate for the loss of certain sources – most notably, among the Baltic political and governmental elites – and keep Stockholm updated with developments. Their effort in this regard arguably adds a new dimension to prevailing understandings of Sweden's interwar Baltic policy.

This is a study of a Soviet espionage mission in Sweden in 1942 under the aegis of the intelligence officer Vasilii Sidorenko. Aside from trying to reconstruct, on the basis of material filed with the archive of the Swedish Security Police (S & auml;po), the history of the mission, the article also addresses methodological challenges following from the fact that we must, as Soviet material remains very scarce, approach Sidorenko's mission indirectly, through material generated by the Swedish police. The article is therefore structured in terms of three separate fields of inquiry-a first that addresses the organization of Sweden's counterespionage with regard the Sidorenko mission, a second that addresses the organization and institutional context within which Sidorenko operated, and a third that addresses the accounts of five Swedish citizens who were suspected and later sentenced for having assisted Sidorenko to collect military intelligence in Sweden. The article concludes that the suggested framework with three fields of inquiry might be helpful in the study of offensive espionage operations in a more general sense.

With the German and Soviet attacks on Poland on 1 and 17 September 1939, respectively, Sweden's secret security service, the Allm & auml;nna s & auml;kerhetstj & auml;nsten, was activated. Over the next six years, until 1945, the two operative agencies of this organization-the Central Agency (Centralbyr & aring;n) for the control of the means of transportation (also referred to as the Trafikmedelskontrollen) and the Scouting Agency (Spaningsbyr & aring;n), or more precisely, its executive organ, the so-called Sixth Squad (Sj & auml;tte roteln) of the Stockholm Criminal Police, collected massive amounts of intelligence, inter alia, with regard to the Soviet legation in Stockholm. On the basis of a review of the documents generated through this work-material that has not been the subject of research before-this study addresses how the Sj & auml;tte roteln, through observation and learning, elaborated routines for handling the challenges of collecting and reporting intelligence on the inner life and espionage of the Soviet legation.

This article approaches the intelligence dimension of Sweden’s arms exports by going back to three governmental decisions, taken in 1914, 1935 and 1971 respectively, all of which have been pivotal to both the Swedish government’s involvement in arms exports and the emergence of government institutions handling the intelligence associated with this export. The article shows that a significant amount of the collection and evaluation of arms exports intelligence is performed by government authorities other than those of traditional intelligence. It also points to the important roles of other actors ‘doing intelligence’ in this field, such as civic movements and investigative journalists.

Raoul Wallenberg, the courageous Swedish financier and trade executive turned diplomat who saved thousands of Jews in Hungary in 1944, was arrested in January 1945 by the Soviet military counterintelligence, incarcerated in the Lubianka prison in Moscow, and later executed for reasons that remain obscure to this day. Drawing on recently declassified Soviet encrypted cables and a wide array of Soviet, Swedish, and U.S. archival sources, Stalin’s Double-Edged Game: Soviet Bureaucracy and the Raoul Wallenberg Case, 1945–1952 offers the first comprehensive analysis of the inner workings and interdepartmental communication of the Soviet foreign and state security ministries in relation to Wallenberg’s case. The way these branches of the Soviet apparatus reacted to Swedish diplomatic approaches because of Wallenberg in the years 1945 through 1948 indicate that Stalin never had any plan for Wallenberg other than to have him murdered and to make the Swedes believe that he died in Hungary shortly after the fall of Budapest. This book thereby challenges prevailing hypotheses about the Soviet leader’s motives in regard to Wallenberg.

This article addresses the causes and motives behind the Soviet decision to hand over the Vyshinskii note to the Swedish government in August 1947. In this note, signed by Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Ia. Vyshinskii, it was falsely claimed that the whereabouts of the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who had been arrested by the Soviet military counterespionage death to the spies (Smersh) on 17 January 1945, were unknown to the Soviet government. Wallenberg had presumably, the note laid down, died during the battle of Budapest in January 1945. On the basis of Soviet and Swedish documents, including recently declassified Soviet encrypted cables, this article examines the chain of events that preceded the decision to hand over the note. New findings among the Soviet encrypted cables suggest that the note may have had no link whatsoever to Wallenberg’s purported death on 17 July 1947. Instead a series of incidents, in particular a crisis in the relations between Sweden and the USSR following the disclosure in late July and early August 1947 of two cases of suspected Soviet military espionage in Sweden, may have been of critical importance for the decision to hand over the note.

In the years 1945-52, that is, between Raoul Wallenberg's incarceration in the Lubianka prison in Moscow (6 February 1945) and the first Swedish demand for his return (11 February 1952), more than fifty people provided the Swedish Foreign Ministry with diffuse and often contradictory information about his whereabouts. This article argues that a number of these testimonies may have been part of a Soviet campaign of disinformation aimed at diverting the Swedes' attention away from Moscow and to have them believe that Wallenberg had died in Hungary. The appearance of messages to this effect by February-March 1945 may indicate that the Soviets had already decided at this early point never to let Wallenberg return alive, or at least to construct an option that would allow for such a decision. In August 1947, after twenty-six Swedish diplomatic approaches on account of Wallenberg over the course of two and a half years, the Soviets handed over a note signed by Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vyshinskii that declared that Wallenberg had presumably died in Hungary. The note had the desired effect. No Swedish diplomatic approaches on Wallenberg were made for the next five years. This article argues that the Vyshinskii note was an extraordinary measure taken by the Soviets finally to get the message of Wallenberg's death in Hungary through to the Swedes. The Soviet disinformation regarding the 1940 Katyn massacre provides an interesting point of reference for understanding the way in which the Soviets tried to mislead Sweden over Wallenberg.

Peter Ruggenthaler, Senior Research Fellow at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on War’s Consequences, Graz, Austria, and a leading expert into Soviet foreign policy, is the author of a v...

In 1982, claims were made that the Swedish diplomat, Raoul Wallenberg, when preparing in mid-January 1945 for his trip to Soviet military headquarter in Debrecen, north of Budapest, concealed large amounts of valuables-gold and jewellery-in his car. Moreover, the argument exists that Russian discovery of these valuables had a significant impact on both Swedish and Soviet handling of his case. Recently re-surfacing in a biography of Wallenberg, this claim is incorrect. The testimonies referred to in its support are fraught with serious weaknesses and, the causal chain allegedly set off about finding the valuables is not verifiable. This analysis argues that the study of the diplomatic history of the Wallenberg case could benefit significantly by taking some basic insights from the field of foreign policy analysis into account.

This article examines the negotiations in the years 1945-7 between Soviet and Swedish diplomats over the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who was arrested by the Soviets in Budapest on 17 January 1945. As is clear from both Soviet and Swedish archival records, including the recently de-classified encrypted Soviet diplomatic cables, the nature of the communication about Wallenberg went through a number of shifts, dividing the years 1945-7 into three periods. Despite in-depth reviews of both the Soviet and Swedish Foreign Ministry archives, no instructions from the political leaderships of Sweden and the USSR explaining these shifts have been identified. Why is it that we can distinguish changing patterns of communication despite the absence of corresponding instructions from the leaders of the two states? This article argues that dynamics inherent to the diplomatic dialogue itself go a long way to explain the shifting communication patterns. In order to make the case viable as well as communicable, Soviet and Swedish diplomats, short of authoritative guidance, were bound to ascribe meaning and purpose to the behaviour of the other' on the basis of analogical reasoning founded on their experiences from parallel matters on the Soviet-Swedish agenda.

This article addresses the claim made by the American journalists Frederick Werbell and Thurston Clarke (in 1982) and the Swedish author and researcher Bengt Jangfeldt (in 2012) to the effect that the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, when preparing to leave Budapest for Debrecen in January 1945, hid jewelry and 15–20 kg of gold in his car. As is evident from the examination conducted here, the testimonies referred to in support of this theory are all fraught with serious problems. Most importantly, there is not a single witness making such a claim before the July 1947 issue of the American journal Reader’s Digest, where it first appeared. The article concludes that the sources referred to are not sufficiently solid to support the claim that Wallenberg tried to bring anything of value out of Budapest, except for the small number of bills of different currencies that was handed over to his relatives by the KGB in 1989, together with his personal belongings. The article also describes a number of known and suspected Soviet attempts to furnish the Swedes with disinformation regarding Wallenberg’s fate and discusses whether the gold-and-jewelry claim is in fact the distant echo of an almost 70-year-old Soviet attempt to discredit Wallenberg.

This article addresses the intricate and previously untold story of a German attempt in 1944 to have an agent, the Latvian Voldemar Blankenfelds, dispatched by boat, via Sweden, to South America where a German intelligence network was being established. Shortly after his arrival in Sweden in June 1944, however, Blankenfelds got in touch with the British diplomatic mission in Stockholm, told them of his assignment and became a double agent, maintaining contacts with the Germans while continually providing information to the British, who in turn kept the Swedish police informed. Blankenfelds was later arrested and interrogated by the Swedes and, when released, agreed to provide them with information as well. He thereby significantly contributed to the arrest and extradition of a German agent in Sweden – the Head of the German tourist agency in Sweden, Baron Bernd von Gossler. Blankenfelds’ assignment to America was repeatedly delayed throughout the autumn of 1944 and by late October, Berlin ordered the mission to be called off altogether. In the meantime, the Germans had tried to have Blankenfelds engage in intelligence activities in Sweden aimed at the Baltic refugee community. Blankenfelds refused however to cooperate. Newly declassified Soviet encrypted cables, together with archival material from Blankenfelds’ file in the archive of Swedish security police, reveal striking similarities between German and Soviet intelligence objectives regarding the Baltic refugees in Sweden.

In the years 1941–1948, thousands of people escaped across the Baltic Sea from eastern Europe to Sweden, primarily from the Baltic states but also from the USSR. On the basis of newly declassified Soviet correspondence through encrypted cables between the Soviet foreign ministry and the Soviet legation in Stockholm for the years 1944–1947, this article addresses the Soviet-Swedish diplomatic negotiations over a number of these refugees. The article also asks whether the 1947 Andrei Vyshinskii note on Raoul Wallenberg should be understood not only as a Soviet attempt to put an end to the Wallenberg case, but also to acquire a change in Sweden’s handling of Soviet requests for the extradition of refugees.

In September 1943, a Polish citizen Mieczyslaw Stachowiak, assigned with the German Wehrmacht’s Organisation Todt to Norway, left his detachment and escaped to Sweden. In the following two years he maintained contacts with no less than five diplomatic missions in Sweden – Britain, Germany, Japan, Spain and the United States – and provided them with false intelligence in return for money. In May 1945, after having tried to trick the Japanese mission in Stockholm to believe that he was a defected Soviet agent operating in Sweden under the false cover of a US citizen, Henri Brunsso Donoa, while simultaneously trying to have the Americans and British to believe that he had been assigned by the Japanese for an intelligence mission in the US, he was arrested by the Swedish police on charges of illegal intelligence activities and was deported later. After two years – in October 1947 – he turned up at the Swedish diplomatic mission in Warsaw claiming that the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, who had been arrested by the Soviets in January 1945 in Budapest, had managed to escape his Soviet guards and was staying with Polish partisans in southeast Poland. This article describes Stachowiak’s intelligence activities, the diplomatic missions and the Swedish police efforts to investigate his disinformation and discusses whether he acted on orders from Moscow when approaching the Swedes regarding Wallenberg.

In March 1946 the Soviet government decided to radically revise their policy towards Sweden. The Soviet demand, ever since November 1944, for the total extradition of the approximately 30,000 Baltic refugees in Sweden was suddenly dropped and a number of measures were taken by Moscow to accomplish a rapprochement between the two countries. On the basis of recently declassified Soviet encrypted diplomatic correspondence between the Soviet mission in Stockholm and the Soviet foreign ministry for the years 1944-1947, this article analyses the way in which the Soviet envoy to Sweden, Il'ia Chernyshev, represented Swedish affairs before his superiors in Moscow, and how these representations may have contributed to Moscow's decision to revise its policy towards Sweden.