But then it was as though the air had been let out of them, and in melancholy moments Berg used to think that the Yugoslavs clearly couldn’t handle the comfortable coziness of Sweden. The terrorist acts flagged in their forecasts had simply not happened, and while year followed year and appropriations continued to climb, the opposite side quite simply refused to deliver all the atrocities that SePo had promised its political superiors. Illegal clubs, aggravated robbery, and the occasional bloody reckoning among Yugoslavian criminals were all well and good, but in the context within which Berg was operating this was clearly insufficient. The politicians had started grumbling, and among operatives within the open operation there was a growing and increasingly vocal opinion maintaining, in complete seriousness, that they now had the Yugoslavs under control and that the secret police ought to occupy itself with other things.
The situation was not good, the trend even worse, and it was at exactly that point that his newly formed threat group, the Group for Analysis and Processing of Information, as it was called in more solemn contexts, had gone in and taken a concerted hold on the entire Balkan problem. Suitable sections of a large number of old strategic analyses acquired from the Swedish military intelligence service and their foreign colleagues had been compiled-the sections that for several years had been promising the imminent collapse of the Yugoslav republic and subsequent total chaos in the Balkans and elsewhere in Europe. With these simple means a report was produced with alarming content for the nation’s guardians: highest level of secrecy, highest priority, and the most restricted distribution to political superiors. Additional appropriations had arrived like a check in the mail.
After that they quickly moved ahead and went to work on the Kurdish problem. It wasn’t all peace and harmony among the Kurdish refugees elsewhere in Europe, and when conflicts flared up they did sometimes shoot each other. The problem was that they stubbornly persisted in only shooting other Kurds, which from a secret police point of view was economic madness. Berg’s German colleague at Constitutional Protection had the same problem as he did, and due to the fact that the Kurds themselves clearly lacked political ambitions they decided they had to do something about this.
First, they increased the pressure on their informants among the Kurdish refugees. They were warned in no uncertain terms that if they couldn’t deliver anything more than the usual nonsense on yet another impending murder of some talkative guy with a fruit stand, they might just as well pack their bags and go back to Turkey. The argument clearly hit home, for within just a few months much disturbing information had come in from several different infiltrators in both Sweden and Germany. It was obvious that extremist political groups among the Kurds were planning assassination attempts on several centrally placed domestic politicians in those countries where they had the privilege of residence as refugees. And yes, new appropriations also arrived like a check in the mail. Finally, thought Berg, who had at last succeeded in showing that there was even a way to squeeze money out of a former shepherd from the mountainous regions around Diyarbakir.
When Berg, much later, looked back at the early eighties, he would think of that period as the happy years in his life. There had been a lot to do, but it had been fun doing it and the successes had been great. Then worries started to pile up. First he was saddled with a regime change. He had calculated at an early stage that the conservatives wouldn’t last forever, and he had no political opinions whatsoever, if someone were to come up with the preposterous idea of asking him, but if he were able to choose… of course.
The conservatives had been easy to deal with, unaccustomed as they were to people like him, but the social democrats represented a different species. That he knew from early experience. Berg had been around a good while, and six years in line for the public troughs had given them sufficient appetite when it was finally time. As soon as the election results were clear, Berg had cleaned out his calendar, taken his closest associates with him to a secure location, and devoted three whole days to analyzing the new situation. Analyze? They had gone over it down to the minutest detail. They were forewarned, and thereby forearmed.
The new government had hardly had time to take its place before the military intelligence service performed the anticipated assault, with the help of its well-trained contacts within the social democratic leadership. It was the usual old turf war, but this time Berg had been better prepared than anyone before him. The day before the meeting in the government office building he had sent over the latest analysis of the situation on the terror front and seen to it that it was well spiced with an optimal selection of the military intelligence authority’s own judgments. Where was the antagonism? Berg wondered innocently. As far as he could understand, both he and his coworkers were in complete agreement with their military colleagues in their view of the matter.
Berg had chosen to head back after the meeting on foot, and as he was walking in the autumn sun between Rosenbad and his own building on Kungsholmen, he became aware that he was humming the finale from Beethoven’s choral symphony. Alle Menschen werden Brüder, Berg hummed contentedly, and when he sat down behind his desk the papers he had requested the weekend before were already topmost on the pile.
First he went to work on the requested compilation of the new government ministers, government secretaries, and the remaining politically appointed officials and advisers who had now taken over the government office building. Up until a day ago, a good many of the latter had been found in the secret police register. For good reasons and with well-deserved thick files, thought Berg with a wry smile, but after the just-completed autumn housecleaning the archives were neat and tidy and all necessary papers that might cause unnecessary annoyance were now in secure storage outside the building. In a week he would meet with the politically appointed board for the secret police, and bets were already being made among his coworkers on which of the new board members would suggest a visit to SePo’s personal archive this time. There were three to choose from, and none of them was a sure thing.
Within the external operation an analysis had been made of the key political figures with whom the parent organization would now be working. All in all it consisted of a dozen people, of which a two-thirds majority sat in Rosenbad and was divided approximately equally among the preliminary Cabinet and the justice and defense departments. All of them had been made a gift of a secret police profile, the main point of which gave a summary of their special interests and inclinations in matters of national security.
With that as a foundation, a client-oriented list of priorities had then been made of those areas and issues that might conceivably appeal to the tastes of the new consumers, and for the time being his entire analysis group was busy picking out the information that must be available when, in approximately two weeks-and here too the wagering was well under way-it would be necessary to demonstrate that these were the very problems which had been viewed for a long time with the utmost seriousness.
The list of priorities was hardly exciting for an old fox like Berg. There were all the usual old articles from the standard assortment, such as the supervision of persons with sensitive positions and the surveillance of various extreme political parties, which solely concerned their own ends regardless of political orientation. Ultimately it was only a matter of weeding a little in the flower beds and shifting perspective a few degrees; after that for the most part things could proceed as before. Obviously it was necessary to raise the priority of neo-Nazis and right-wing extremists, as much as this irked him. His resources were not inexhaustible, and it was Berg’s firm conviction that there were better ways to use money than keeping an eye on a few hundred semi-retarded, misguided, snot-nosed kids who marched out of step even when they didn’t have a case of strong beer under their belts. Which they no doubt usually did, Berg thought acidly. But that is how things were now and that’s the way it would have to be.