You shouldn’t complicate matters unnecessarily, thought the special adviser, who’d had William of Occam as one of his philosophical favorites ever since he was in grade school. So forget Johansson, he thought. He could probably also forget the CIA. There were papers in one of their archives but this by no means meant that they had any active knowledge of the prime minister’s doings almost forty years ago. Tricky, thought the special adviser, they might know something but they don’t necessarily have to.
On the other hand, if they did know something, things got simpler. Considering the security situation in northern Europe, they must be hoping Buchanan’s spiritual inheritance didn’t become public knowledge. Perhaps during the days of the conflict in Vietnam, and in the inflammatory conditions that then prevailed, but hardly now when the wounded relations between Sweden and the United States had been allowed to heal for many years and even the scars had started to fade. Then they had themselves to think about as well. You weren’t allowed to do what Buchanan had done, never mind how incensed you might become at a former agent. Bad for business, thought the special adviser.
The problems you have are here at home, thought the special adviser, and the operative who was the cause of it all was probably the person he needed to be least concerned about. Krassner’s so-called suicide note was hardly something the operative had an interest in reading about in the newspaper. Then Johansson need not be the only one to figure out what had actually happened, and Krassner’s murder was actually almost the whole point.
If you started swinging that scythe, then the murderer would not be the only one to wind up in the rake. He would have company all the way up, but while he himself and Berg and Waltin, and possibly others that he didn’t know, would only be forced to leave their jobs and be ass-whipped in the media in the usual way, the murderer would go to prison on a life sentence, and even though the drop in social status was relative, that could hardly be what he was hoping for. On the contrary, the suicide that he had so dexterously and cold-bloodedly arranged indicated that he absolutely did not want to get caught and that he had a considerable capacity to avoid doing so.
His dear boss would naturally have to go, despite the fact that he had no idea either of Krassner’s existence or that his youthful convictions were threatening to catch up with him. For once that happened, his ignorance would be almost worse than his active involvement. The political ripple effect would of course be considerable, and the nation, the party, and the opposition would certainly be able to contain their laughter. Certain people would of course be greatly amused, but it was always that way.
We’ll take that up later, for it doesn’t need to get that bad, thought the special adviser, and he returned to Berg and Waltin. It was these two lightweights who had initiated, carried out, and been responsible for this entire extraordinarily poorly managed affair. Did they know anything about what had actually happened? Probably not, thought the special adviser. He was almost certain that Berg didn’t know anything. True, he’d never met Waltin, but if Forselius’s description was correct he hardly appeared to be the most assiduous laborer in the security vineyard. They probably neither know nor suspect anything, thought the special adviser. And if they do, they ought to have a strong and natural interest in keeping quiet about it. Out of pure instinct for self-preservation.
Provided that no one started giving them a bad time, of course, and drove them into a corner so that they stopped behaving rationally and instead started striking wildly around themselves. We actually have a little problem here, thought the special adviser, because it was he who had been the main driving force behind the secret political agreement to close down or in any case recast the so-called external operation, and as if in passing teach Berg and his coworkers to behave themselves by darkening their lives with yet another parliamentary investigation of the secret police. Good thing Johansson showed up in time, thought the special adviser, feeling almost a little energized at the thought of how he would have to convince those around him of the importance of making a complete reversal.
Forselius, he thought. What do I do with him? And considering what he now knew, he already regretted that he’d called him and asked that question about who Fionn was. True, the old man was almost eighty and drank like a fish, but there was nothing really wrong with his head. Perhaps I ought to invite him to dinner, thought the special adviser; in the worst case I can always poison his food.
The special adviser had devoted days, months, and years of his life to thinking about how one might politically defuse the security politics that Sweden had carried on in secrecy during the years after the end of the Second World War. He and Forselius had even arranged seminars where this was analyzed and discussed. Those invited had been few in number-at the most there had been seven people around the table-and everyone who came had to sign the usual confidentiality agreement.
Obviously these were only the sort of people who already knew how things stood, so you avoided wasting time on that question. At the same time there were hundreds of people who knew. Politicians and military people naturally made up the largest group, but there were also historians, journalists, and corporate executives who had acquired knowledge of the matter in various ways, as well as the usual small number of thinking people who on their own steam had figured out how things were. Of course you couldn’t invite all of these people in-that was contrary to the mission and would have been both counterproductive and dysfunctional-but because the special adviser and Forselius only wanted to meet the sort of people who had something essential to say, and obviously according to their own way of viewing the matter, the number called in had not caused any problems whatsoever.
As far as Sweden was concerned, in a political-security sense the years after the end of the Second World War might best be compared with a long walk on ice that has formed overnight. What would the great neighbor in the east think up? At its heart was an almost four-hundred-year history of constant wars with and political opposition to the Russian archenemy. A country then led by Joseph Stalin and that in a geopolitical sense had never before stood so close to Swedish territory. The Russians were in Finland, in the Baltic states, in Poland, in Germany, even on the Danish islands in the Baltic Sea. Wherever you turned you only saw the Russian bear with his mighty paws, ready to deliver the final embrace.
Which way could they go? If it was a matter of flight, there was only a wounded Norway to make for, but considering how the Scandinavian peninsula looked, the only advantage of Norway was that in such a case it was a very short sprint. There was no question of throwing themselves into the arms of the West, either. First, the West wasn’t interested-they had more important things to work on-and the Swedes’ cooperation with the Nazis was well remembered by far too many people. Second, the Russians would naturally never allow such a thing and wouldn’t even need to declare war in order to make clear to the Western powers why that wouldn’t work. The West had already figured that out on its own, and considerably greater values than Swedish neutrality were at stake on the European continent. And just see how things had gone for the Poles, despite the fact that they’d allied themselves with both England and France even before the war.