Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [42]
Gullberg had spent his life on his majesty’s secret service, or perhaps more accurately in the secret service of the social-democratic welfare state. Which was an irony, since he had faithfully voted for the moderates in one election after another, except for 1991 when he deliberately voted against the moderates because he believed that Carl Bildt was a realpolitik catastrophe. He had voted instead for Ingvar Carlsson. The years of “Sweden’s best government” had also confirmed his worst fears. The moderate government had come to power when the Soviet Union was collapsing, and in his opinion no government had been less prepared to meet the new political opportunities emerging in the East, or to make use of the art of espionage. On the contrary, the Bildt government had cut back the Soviet desk for financial reasons and had at the same time got themselves involved in the international mess in Bosnia and Serbia – as if Serbia could ever threaten Sweden. The result was that a fabulous opportunity to plant long-term informants in Moscow had been lost. Some day, when relations would once again worsen – which according to Gullberg was inevitable – absurd demands would be made on the Security Police and the military intelligence service; they would be expected to wave their magic wand and summon up well-placed agents out of a bottle.
*
Gullberg had begun at the Russia desk of the third division of the state police, and after two years in the job had undertaken his first tentative field work in 1952 and 1953 as an Air Force attaché with the rank of captain at the embassy in Moscow. Strangely enough, he was following in the footsteps of another well-known spy. Some years earlier that post had been occupied by the notorious Colonel Wennerström.
Back in Sweden, Gullberg had worked in Counter-Espionage, and ten years later he was one of the younger security police officers who, working under Otto Danielsson, exposed Wennerström and eventually got him a life sentence for treason at Långholmen prison.
When the Security Police was reorganized under Per Gunnar Vinge in 1964 and became the Security Division of the National Police Board, or Swedish Internal Security – S.I.S. – the major increase in personnel began. By then Gullberg had worked at the Security Police for fourteen years, and had become one of its trusted veterans.
Gullberg had never used the designation “Säpo” for Säkerhetspolisen, the Security Police. He used the term “S.I.S.” in official contexts, and among colleagues he would also refer to “the Company” or “the Firm,” or merely “the Division” – but never “Säpo”. The reason was simple. The Firm’s most important task for many years was so-called personnel control, that is, the investigation and registration of Swedish citizens who might be suspected of harbouring communist or subversive views. Within the Firm the terms communist and traitor were synonymous. The later conventional use of the term “Säpo” was actually something that the potentially subversive communist publication Clarté had coined as a pejorative name for the communist-hunters within the police force. For the life of him Gullberg could never imagine why his former boss P.G. Vinge had entitled his memoirs Säpo Chief 1962–1970.
It was the reorganization of 1964 that had shaped Gullberg’s future career.
The designation S.I.S. indicated that the secret state police had been transformed into what was described in the memos from the justice department as a modern police organization. This involved recruiting new personnel and continual problems breaking them in. In this expanding organization “the Enemy” were presented with dramatically improved opportunities to place agents within the division. This meant in turn that internal security had to be intensified