Notes
1
Colonel Stig Wennerstrom of the Swedish air force was convicted of treason in 1964. During the ’50s he was suspected of leaking air defence plans to the Soviets and in 1963 was informed upon by his maid, who had been recruited by Sapo. Initially sentenced to life imprisonment, his sentence was commuted to twenty years in 1973, of which he served only ten. He died in 2006. Not to be confused with Hans-Erik Wennerstrom, the crooked financier who appears in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire.
2
Olof Palme was the leader of the Social Democratic Party and Prime Minister of Sweden at the time of his assassination on 28 February 1986. He was an outspoken politician, popular on the left and detested by the right. Two years after his death a petty criminal and drug addict was convicted of his murder, but later acquitted on appeal. Although a number of alternative theories as to who carried out the murder have since been proposed, to this day the crime remains unsolved.
Prompted by Olof Palme’s assassination, Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson called an investigation into the procedures of the Swedish security police (Sapo) in the autumn of 1987. Carl Lidbom, then Swedish ambassador to France, was given the task of leading the investigation. One of his old acquaintances, the publisher Ebbe Carlsson, firmly believed that the Kurdish organization PKK was involved in the murder and was given resources to start a private investigation. The Ebbe Carlsson affair exploded as a major political scandal in 1988, when it was revealed that the publisher had been secretly supported by the then Minister of Justice, Anna-Greta Leijon. She was subsequently forced to resign.
3
Anna Lindh was a Swedish Social Democratic politician who served as foreign minister from 1998 until her assassination in 2003. She was considered by many as one of the leading candidates to succeed Goran Persson as leader of the Social Democrats and Prime Minister of Sweden. In the final weeks of her life she was intensely involved in the pro-euro campaign preceding the Swedish referendum on the euro.
4
Informationsbyran (IB) was a secret intelligence agency without official status within the Swedish armed forces. Its main purpose was to gather information about communists and other individuals who were perceived to be a threat to the nation. It was thought that these findings were passed on to key politicians at cabinet level, most likely the defence minister at the time, Sven Andersson, and Prime Minister Olof Palme. The exposure of the agency’s operations by journalists Jan Guillou and Peter Bratt in the magazine Folket i Bild/Kulturfront in 1973 became known as the IB affair.
5
The Sjobo debate – In the late ’80s and early ’90s there was an immigration crisis in Sweden. The number of asylum seekers increased, and the resulting unemployment and backlash from local government prompted the city of Sjobo to hold a referendum 1998, where the population voted against accepting immigrants. The subsequent political debate led to a combined immigration and integration system in the Aliens Act of 1989.
6
Carl Bildt was Prime Minister of Sweden between 1991 and 1994 and leader of the liberal conservative Moderate Party from 1986 to 1999.
7
See note 1.
8
See note 2.
