Swedish scandals

Andrew Brown

Stockholm

If you can learn about a country from its scandals, this has been a revealing week. From the municipality of Stockholm to the Mafia and the KGB, sinister organisations have been making news. The KGB has been accused of infiltrating Sveriges Radio, the state television company, but to judge from most newspaper comments, what has really shocked the Swedes has been the discovery that their own security service, `Saepo', has informants within the concern.

The story began two years ago, and became known in the new year, just after Saepo's first real success against the Rus- sians for ten years, when three Soviet spies were expelled at Christmas time. Saepo's achievement was not so much to catch them, but to have fed them rubbish for a long time before expelling them. Before then, the combination of an inadequate chief and Stig Bergling, a Russian agent high in the organisation, had reduced Saepo to concentrating on anti-terrorist spying. In this they were quite successful, uncovering among other things a plot by members of the Baader-Meinhof gang to kidnap Anna- Greta Leijon, who is now Minister of Labour.

The Baader-Meinhof gang was quite popular among the left-wing intelligentsia here so long as they only killed foreigners. One of their most articulate sympathisers in the early Seventies was a jurist named Goeran Elwin, who is now head of the documentary department of one of the television channels here. Saepo quite clearly believe that Elwin was not just an apologis for the gang, and have done everything in their power to hinder his career. But to be a known enemy of Saepo's is, if anything, an advantage if you are planning a career within Sveriges Radio, and not just because the clique that runs the house union is known as the Moscow Mafia.

Ever since 13, the military intelligence organisation, had two of the best jour- nalists in Sweden jailed because they had uncovered IB's existence, and the fact that it was spying on the trade unions, the ma- jority of Swedish journalists, who tend to suffer from a Watergate complex anyway, have regarded their own security services as wholly malevolent organisations, somewhere to the right of Adolf Hitler, grotesquely overstaffed, and ludicrously in- competent. In other words, as the mirror image of Sveriges Radio.

But laughter won't make the KGB go away. In 1980, Magnus Faxen, who was then the head of Swedish television, and is now the head of the Foreign Office press department, approached Saepo about leaks to Eastern Europe of information on pro- grammes planned about dissidents there. He had been alerted to these by another journalist specialising in these problems, a refugee named Hanus Weber. Weber claim- ed that the Eastern bloc embassies in Stockholm often knew of planned pro- grammes of this type before they had been finalised. He also claims that those em- bassies were giving visas more easily to journalists from Sveriges Radio who could be relied on for a sympathetic slant in their stories. Weber claims also to have seen a list of Sveriges Radio's emigre sources lying around in a Warsaw Pact embassy. He tested his suspicions by starting a rumour that he was going to interview Andrei Sakharov on a certain day, with the result that Sakharov's flat was searched and seal- ed off by the KGB on the appointed day.

Saepo named Elwin in a report to the government before interviewing Hanus Weber. This did not prevent Elwin from be- ing promoted to his present job, but it did later come to embarrass Faxen. For when a journalist named Erik Eriksson, who had worked under Elwin in 1980 and 1981, on a programme about Saepo amongst other things, published the story, Faxen claimed that Weber had gone to Saepo first, and behind the backs of his superiors.

What Eriksson said was that Saepo, rather than the KGB, had informers in Sveriges Radio, and that this was what was most shocking. The media Left really do think like that here. Even Sam Nilsson, the head of the TV channel concerned, whom all left-thinking people know is a hopeless reactionary, reacted to the scandal by say-

mg that it was just as reprehensible to talk to Saepo as to a foreign embassy.

The Minister of Justice, Ove Rainer, another charming man with the addi- tional quality of perfectly mirroring public

opinion, came as close as he decently could to disavowing Saepo's activities, yet he did not quite do so. For though the Social Democrats give the impression that they find a noisy and efficient counter-espionage organisation as painful as a quiet and useless one, they will settle for efficiency if they are forced to choose. But you can't ex- pect them to let slip an opportunity to re- mind Saepo that the activities of a secret service are best kept secret. They will not have forgotten, either, that the chief of the national police kept in his office safe for two years documents which he believed to prove that his immediate superior, the Minister of Justice, liked little girls in a way not just unwise, but illegal. Eventually he took his suspicions to Olof Palme, then prime minister, who told him not to be so bloody stupid. The story was eventually dug up by one of the journalists who had been jailed over the IB affair, and who thus had it in for the minister concerned. This man now works for Dagerts.Nyheter, which was silly enough to print the story as if the police chief's suspicions could possibly have been well founded. The minister concerned is now dead, but his name will live for ever — in the fund to teach good journalism which Dagens Nyheter set up, and now pays for, after a settlement out of court.

So few journalists here are taking serious- ly the fact that Saepo have tried to hinder Elwin from being given a wartime posting commensurate with his position in the television hierarchy. The Elwin affair is now the subject of an internal inquiry at Sveriges Radio. Elwin will keep his job, with enhanced prestige, unless he turns out to have done something with which he could be charged in court.

A fitting backdrop to this story was pro- vided by the end of the mass trial of 58

revanchist running clogs of the interna-

tional pedestrian conspiracy, until recentlY employed as parking-meter emptiers by the city of Stockholm. They had been stealing between seven and ten million kronor — seven freight-cars full of coins — a year from the meters which they emptied. Ten, who had stolen less than £2,500 each, received suspended sentences. The others, who had stolen or handled sums ranging from £2,500 to £75,000, received prison sentences of up to 20 months.

Their union accused the press of 'blackening the names of all parking-meter emptiers' by ignoring the four department employees who were not charged. It is negotiating to have the prisoners reinstated after their release.

As for the Mafia, they seem to have been enriched with a million pounds of tax- payers' money, with which the Swedish Forestry Commission had hoped to bribe Italian politicians. But that's another story