Based on his historical knowledge and everything he knew about the work of foreign security agencies, he also had a strategy for how he might get his new operation to grow and develop. The ultimate goal he envisioned was a secret bureau, or perhaps even a separate secret organization for constitutional protection, where not only the secret police were under surveillance, but also the so-called open operation within the police, and the military, of course, as well as every other governmental authority, private organization, or sector whose activity might conceivably threaten or damage the highest political authority. This mission was the historical basis of all governmental security services, the primary task overshadowing everything else. Constitutional protection, thought Berg. An excellent phrase in a context where he had to be utterly discreet when describing his assignment to an outside world often both ignorant and hostile, and which gladly took any opportunity to portray the guardians of democracy as its enemies.
The Swedish secret police, in contrast to its counterparts in both the West and the East, was an organization made up almost exclusively of police officers. The Swedish secret police had no intellectual or academic tradition whatsoever, and it was Berg’s firm conviction that this was also its main strength. No upper-class pansies from Oxford or Cambridge who might sell out the whole country to the enemy for a piece of ass at some shabby hotel in a third-world country; no overexcited theoreticians who couldn’t think a single original thought without immediately broadcasting it in a seminar with a crowd of their ilk; no philosophical scatterbrains or political brooders. A completely pure organization made up solely of police officers, thought Berg.
During the following years they indeed had great and well-deserved successes, both within the organization as a whole and perhaps above all else within that part of the operation that was Berg’s darling; day by day it was becoming more and more like the secret bureau for constitutional protection that he had imagined. They had good luck and they had bad luck, made use of the good and turned the bad to their advantage; in brief, they successfully managed the whole situation.
At first they had good luck, exposing a spy within their own organization. An alcoholic police officer who had sold secret information to the enemy with all the finesse of a common street peddler and whose prices weren’t much higher. Life imprisonment, good press, and encouraging pats on the back from the average man on the street as well as from the political bosses.
Then they had bad luck. Hostile-minded elements on the outermost fringes of the left had spread a story that it was in reality the Israeli security service that had captured the Swedish spy. In their usual unsentimental way, their agents were said to have spirited him away at the Beirut airport and conveyed him to a suitably situated prison hole where they put the muzzle of a gun to his temple and invited him to unburden his conscience. When he was through with that, which should only have taken a few days, they had driven him back to the airport and put him on the airplane to Copenhagen, at which time they called their Swedish colleagues and informed them that they had just sent them a present.
True or not, this had caused problems. Berg was not one to debate his operation in the media, however much the media nagged, but the minister of justice, who was politically responsible, had taken up the matter at their weekly meeting, and for reasons of which only he and Berg were aware he had chosen to sound more worried than irritated. Was there any truth in these, to say the least, astounding assertions?
Berg shook his head emphatically. Not in the least, but as so often before in a situation like this the truth was such that it couldn’t be told or discussed even in the most exclusive company. It was actually his internal security group that had been on the trail of the spy and the external part of that group that had carried out the practical aspects. Because the operation was so sensitive, and must be concealed at all costs, it was Berg who had made contact with the Israelis and in consultation with them worked out the actual arrest. Afterward they had collectively cooked up a kidnapping story on how it had been done and through their usual channels seen to it that the “news” spread to their opponents.
“They swallowed it all, hook, line, and sinker, so we killed two birds with one stone,” Berg summarized, with a friendly nod toward the speechless minister. Just like you, but the other way around, he thought.
“You may rest assured that this will stay in this room,” the minister of justice replied warmly.
Unmasking a spy in your own organization was good, but nothing you could live on until the end of time, and if there was more than one it could quickly get really bad. Besides, it was unnecessary. What security work was primarily about was refining information that was being gathered anyway, taking care to manage every conceivable risk, and exploiting this to the organization’s advantage. In that way conditions for expansion could be created without a need to point out a lot of annoyances that had already occurred.
Threats and menaces, dangers and future scenarios, prognoses and preventive measures were what it was really about, and you would have to be a complete fool not to understand that a well-written, well-supported, and selectively distributed security analysis, all else aside, was far superior to any number of airplane hijackings, bombing attacks, or assassinated politicians when it was a matter of securing economic resources. We have a lot to learn from the Germans, thought Berg, who had studied in detail how they dealt with the legacy from their domestic terrorists. But we haven’t been as good on that point, he thought. At the beginning of the eighties it was time for the next change of organization.
First the in-house part of the operation was renamed the Group for Departmental Protection. For one thing this sounded better, a little more diffuse, a little broader, a little more Swedish, to put it simply. Also, the workload had increased markedly and among other things a special unit had been formed to inspect and refine all the information compiled within the framework of the overarching operation. No possibilities could be left untried in the hunt for new resources. Berg had been careful to underscore this when they had an introductory kickoff. Even if he hadn’t put it that way.
The external operation had been retained. True, it had grown so markedly that it became necessary to create yet another front organization, which in turn gave rise to a set of leadership and coordination problems, the solution to which was found within the framework of a foundation, but the fundamental strategy, as well as the direction of the work, remained the same as before.
The special “threat group” that he had set up-Berg often, and with pride, used to think of it as his own marketing department-also had a very successful start in its operation. First, the situation in the Balkans had been taken up. Since the early 1970s, the Yugoslavs had been a source of happiness for the Swedish secret police. Croatian extremists had shot the republic’s Serbian ambassador, after which their comrades freed them from a Swedish prison by hijacking an airplane, and in the end the Swedish secret police received major appropriations to battle the new terrorism.
But the Yugoslavs had been good in more ways than that. The stream of political refugees had increased steadily, and among those who came here there were strong political divisions and a reasonable element of common career criminals who gladly sat up nights, conspiring in their smoky club quarters. Appropriations for reconnaissance and external surveillance, wiretapping, and interpreters had multiplied. Appropriations for interpreters alone had increased by more than two thousand percent in less than five years.