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Sweden: Spying on the left

01 November 1998

On 2 December the Board for controlling military intelligence released their report on military intelligence activities up to 1981. It shows that military intelligence focused extensively on Swedish citizens, and that many different kinds of "dissidents" were presumed to be communists or covert-communists and therefore "security risks". Many Swedish people were regarded as security-risks, including bishops, journalists and politicians. The main surveillance was by the Social Democratic Party and the military intelligence, where the latter used the unions to gather intelligence on "suspects" and the Social Democratic Party used about 200-800 willing "spies" and up to 22,000 people who they gathered information who were unaware they were being used as "informers".

On 30 November, two days before the release of the report of the Board,it was revealed that the Security Police had tried to prevent people they did not like - for example, critics of the Security Police - from becoming journalists and executives at the Swedish Radio and Television. This had previously been denied but a secret tape recorded the journalist (Goran Elwin) which he made in 1981 when he discussed the matter with the head of the National Police Force (Romander) and the head of the Security Police was broadcast on Swedish radio.

On 23 December the Registration Board will release its report on the Swedish security police which will reveal how many more "Leander cases" there were during the period October 1969 to June 1986 - it is believed there are more than a thousand (see Statewatch, vol 7 no 6).