the Section’s secretary Eleanor Badenbrink, and two officers whose job it was to compile and analyse any intelligence information that Zalachenko might contribute. Seven individuals who over the coming years would constitute a special Section within the Section. He thought of them as the Inner Circle.
Outside the Section the information was known by the chief of S.I.S., the assistant chief, and the head of Secretariat. Besides them, the Prime Minister and a state secretary. A total of twelve. Never before had a secret of this magnitude been known to such a very small group.
Then Gullberg’s expression darkened. The secret was known also to a thirteenth person. Bjorck had been accompanied at Zalachenko’s original reception by a lawyer, Nils Erik Bjurman. To include Bjurman in the special Section would be out of the question. Bjurman was not a real security policeman – he was really no more than a trainee at S.I.S. – and he did not have the requisite experience or skills. Gullberg considered various alternatives and then chose to steer Bjurman carefully out of the picture. He used the threat of imprisonment for life, for treason, if Bjurman were to breathe so much as one syllable about Zalachenko, and at the same time he offered inducements, promises of future assignments, and finally he used flattery to bolster Bjurman’s feeling of importance. He arranged for Bjurman to be hired by a well-regarded law firm, who then provided him with a steady stream of assignments to keep him busy. The only problem was that Bjurman was such a mediocre lawyer that he was hardly capable of exploiting his opportunities. He left the firm after ten years and opened his own practice, which eventually became a law office at Odenplan.
Over the following years Gullberg kept Bjurman under discreet but regular surveillance. That was Bjorck’s job. It was not until the end of the ’80s that he stopped monitoring Bjurman, at which time the Soviet Union was heading for collapse and Zalachenko had ceased to be a priority.
For the Section, Zalachenko had at first been thought of as a potential breakthrough in the Palme mystery. Palme had accordingly been one of the first subjects that Gullberg discussed with him during the long debriefing.
The hopes for a breakthrough, however, were soon dashed, since Zalachenko had never operated in Sweden and had little knowledge of the country. On the other hand, Zalachenko had heard the rumour of a “Red Jumper,” a highly placed Swede – or possibly other Scandinavian politician – who worked for the K.G.B.
Gullberg drew up a list of names that were connected to Palme: Carl Lidbom, Pierre Schori, Sten Andersson, Marita Ulfskog, and a number of others. For the rest of his life, Gullberg would come back again and again to that list, but he never found an answer.
Gullberg was suddenly a big player: he was welcomed with respect in the exclusive club of selected warriors, all known to each other, where the contacts were made through personal friendship and trust, not through official channels and bureaucratic regulations. He met Angleton, and he got to drink whisky at a discreet club in London with the chief of M.I.6. He was one of the elite.
He was never going to be able to tell anyone about his triumphs, not even in posthumous memoirs. And there was the ever-present anxiety that the Enemy would notice his overseas journeys, that he might attract attention, that he might involuntarily lead the Russians to Zalachenko. In that respect Zalachenko was his worst enemy.
During the first year, the defector had lived in an anonymous apartment owned by the Section. He did not exist in any register or in any public document. Those within the Zalachenko unit thought they had plenty of time before they had to plan his future. Not until the spring of 1978 was he given a passport in the name of Karl Axel Bodin, along with a laboriously crafted personal history – a fictitious but verifiable background in Swedish records.
By that time it was already too late. Zalachenko had gone and fucked that stupid whore Agneta Sofia Salander, nee Sjolander, and he had heedlessly told her his real name – Zalachenko. Gullberg began to believe that Zalachenko was not quite right in the head. He suspected that the Russian defector
There were whores, there were periods of excessive drinking, and there were incidents of violence and trouble with bouncers and others. On three occasions Zalachenko was arrested by the Swedish police for drunkenness and twice more in connection with fights in bars. Every time the Section had to intervene discreetly and bail him out, seeing to it that documents disappeared and records were altered. Gullberg assigned Bjorck to babysit the defector almost around the clock. It was not an easy job, but there was no alternative.
Everything could have gone fine. By the early ’80s Zalachenko had calmed down and begun to adapt. But he never gave up the whore Salander – and worse, he had become the father of Camilla and Lisbeth Salander.
Gullberg pronounced the name with displeasure.
Ever since the girls were nine or ten, he had had a bad feeling about Lisbeth. He did not need a psychiatrist to tell him that she was not normal. Bjorck had reported that she was vicious and aggressive towards her father and that she seemed to be not in the least afraid of him. She did not say much, but she expressed in a thousand other ways her dissatisfaction with how things stood. She was a problem in the making, but how gigantic this problem would become was something Gullberg could never have imagined in his wildest dreams. What he most feared was that the situation in the Salander family would give rise to a social welfare report that named Zalachenko. Time and again he urged the man to cut his ties and disappear from their lives. Zalachenko would give his word, and then would always break it. He had other whores. He had plenty of whores. But after a few months he was always back with the Salander woman.
Gullberg had no doubt that Zalachenko was a sick bastard, but he was in no position to pick and choose among defecting G.R.U. agents. He had only one, a man very aware of his value to Gullberg.
The Zalachenko unit had taken on the role of clean-up patrol in that sense. It was undeniable. Zalachenko knew that he could take liberties and that they would resolve whatever problems there might be. When it came to Agneta Sofia Salander, he exploited his hold over them to the maximum.
Not that there were not warnings. When Salander was twelve, she had stabbed Zalachenko. His wounds had not been life-threatening, but he was taken to St Goran’s hospital and the group had more of a mop-up job to do than ever. Gullberg then made it crystal clear to Zalachenko that he must never have any more dealings with the Salander family, and Zalachenko had given his promise. A promise he kept for more than six months before he turned up at Agneta Sofia Salander’s place and beat her so savagely that she ended up in a nursing home where she would be for the rest of her life.
That the Salander girl would go so far as to make a Molotov cocktail Gullberg had not foreseen. That day had been utter chaos. All manner of investigations loomed, and the future of the Zalachenko unit – of the whole Section even – had hung by a thread. If Salander talked, Zalachenko’s cover was at risk, and if that were to happen a number of operations put in place across Europe over the past fifteen years might have to be dismantled. Furthermore, there was a possibility that the Section would be subjected to official scrutiny, and that had to be prevented at all costs.
Gullberg had been consumed with worry. If the Section’s archives were opened, a number of practices would be revealed that were not always consistent with the dictates of the constitution, not to mention their years of investigations of Palme and other prominent Social Democrats. Just a few years after Palme’s assassination that was still a sensitive issue. Prosecution of Gullberg and several other employees of the Section would inevitably follow. Worse, as like as not, some ambitious scribbler would float the theory that the Section was behind the assassination of Palme, and that in turn would lead to even more damaging speculation and perhaps yet more insistent investigation. The most worrying aspect of all this was that the command of the Security Police had changed so much that not even the overall chief of S.I.S. now knew about the existence of the Section. All contacts with S.I.S. stopped at the desk of the new assistant chief of Secretariat, and he had been on the staff of the Section for ten years.
A mood of acute panic, even fear, overtook the unit. It was in fact Bjorck who had proposed the solution. Peter Teleborian, a psychiatrist, had become associated with S.I.S.’s department of Counter-Espionage in a quite
