Sweden/Stay Behind

Sweden/Stay Behind
Parent organization	Operation Gladio
Interest of	Office for Special Acquisition

After WW2 and the beginning of the Cold War, a network of Stay Behind groups were organized all over Western Europe, to prepare for a potential Soviet occupation. In Sweden, the groups were at first organized by private persons, but soon the government joined in. These clandestine military units prepared for intelligence gathering, political surveillance, sabotage, assassinations, and evacuation of key personnel.

History

Strangely, no such groups seem to have been organized against a potential German occupation in WW2.

After WW2 and the beginning of the Cold War, a network of Stay Behind groups were organized all over Western Europe, to prepare for a potential Soviet occupation.

The central leader in Sweden became Alvar Lindencrona, director of the insurance company Thule. He had close connections to tycoon Marcus Wallenberg Jr. and the top leadership in the Swedish business world. (There was also a close contact between Wallenberg and Jens Chr. Hauge, who was a central in organizing the Norwegian Stay Behind.)

The CIA established its Stay Behind presence in Sweden based on these private initiatives. How much the Swedish government knew, or chose not to know, is uncertain. But the government soon became involved, and close contacts between NATO and the officially non-aligned Sweden government led to the formation of Stay-behind. Minister of the Interior Eije Mossberg and Prime Minister Tage Erlander soon became involved. A letter to the Telegrafverket's director general, Håkan Sterky, in which Erlander commissions the formation of a secret resistance movement, is one of the few documentary proofs that the network actually existed. The military intelligence organization Grupp B also started organizing a Stay-behind network in 1946 or 1947.

Organization

The Swedish Stay-behind's daily operations were managed from an apartment in central Stockholm, in Bergsgatan 16. Lindencrona's group had meetings at home on Stureplan 4. The organization also had a secret office in Thulehuset, the HQ of the Thule Insurance Company, on Sveavägen, which was accessed from Luntmakargatan - a fact highly relevant in the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986.

The leadership committee officially included the Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs (since 1969 also the Minister of Defense) and representatives of workers, civil servants, farmers, the police, the military and the telecommunications network (This is improbably many people for a clandestine leadership group, a tighter operative leadership most likely existed). This broad representation would guarantee that the organization had legitimacy with the people during a possible occupation. In 1954, Erlander informed the opposition leaders Bertil Ohlin (FP) and Jarl Hjalmarsson (H) about Stay-behind, but without mentioning many details. Not even Erlander's employees, like the later Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson understood why Erlander met Lindencrona so often, Carlsson assumed that they were talking about insurance issues.

According to former Chief of Defense Carl Eric Almgren, the movement consisted of a total of 300-400 people, a rather modest estimate. Former Swedish Employers Association (SAF} chief Curt-Steffan Giesecke became leader of Stay-behind in 1978, the same year he left SAF to become CEO of the insurance company Trygg-Hansa. He went on record saying that activities continued unabated in the 1970s and into the 1990s.

According to some sources^[Who?], Stay-behind was discontinued in the years 2001–2003, but according to other information, the movement is still in existence in another form.

International

Internationally, the group was affiliated with NATO's Clandestine Planning Committee (CPC), where the covert networks from the various NATO countries met. Lindencrona and others from Swedish Stay-behind participated in the meetings as observers. Since 1961, there were also meetings with NATO's Northern Command, which included Denmark, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. This approach made it possible to plausibly deny all forms of interference while officially maintaining national control over the group. Curt-Steffan Giesecke, who took over Stay-behind in 1978, states that the group mainly had contacts with British MI6 and MI5.

Palme assassination

Full article: Olof Palme

Several things point to Stay Behind members having been part in the assassination of PM Olof Palme in 1986. Several of the members were on the extreme right or outright Nazi sympathizers, with a passionate hatred for the Prime Minister.

The training of the operatives included intelligence gathering, political surveillance, sabotage and assassinations and exfiltration of personnel.

At the night of the murder, people with advanced communications equipment were observed in the area. The HQ of Stay Behind in the Thule Insurance Company was mentioned in the investigation.

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References

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