During and after World War II Sweden was spying in the occupied Baltic countries which had been occupied, from 1943 by Nazi Germany and from 1944 by the Soviet Union. It began in 1943, with the Germans still occupying the Baltic countries, when Sweden and its intelligence service “C-byrån” recruited volunteers among the Baltic refugees in Sweden and sent them back to the countries they had fled from. Many of the Baltic refugees to Sweden were men aged 25-45 so the Swedish intelligence service had a good recruiting source. This started the first period of intelligence operations in the three Baltic countries. In 1946 Swedish intelligence was reorganized and Thede Palm was appointed head of, what was named, T-kontoret. He ran the T-kontoret until 1965. Palm transformed the intelligence to the situation needed for the Cold War and he expanded co-operation with the British Military Intelligence Service, MI6. This constitutes the second phase of Swedish intelligence operations in the Baltics. The first two years did not produce any exciting results. The reports from T-kontoret contained information mostly about the resistance movements in the three Baltic countries but not much about the military installations. The Swedish Defence Ministry and the Swedish High Commander of the Defence, Helge Jung, developed plans, based on a Soviet Union attack on Sweden, which was believed to be a real threat at that time. Besides, and in spite of Swedish neutrality, Helge Jung was very oriented to the West and often in opposition to parts of the Swedish Government which meant that the Government was not always fully informed about Swedish secret military operations in the Baltics and the Baltic Sea. When the Cold War intensified in 1948, the Swedes planned and carried out the setting-up of agents in the Baltics. This constitutes the third period of the operations. It all happened in co-operation with MI6. What they did not know about was that most of the operations were infiltrated by the Soviet MGB (the name of the Soviet secret police from 1946 to 1953) and therefore doomed to failure. This thesis focuses on the third period and the following questions: i) how did the results from the operations change between period 2 (1946-1948), and period 3 (1948-1953); ii) what was reported; and iii) did Swedish intelligence put the emphasis on special geographical areas and on specific targets? The results from the third period of intelligence operations in the Baltics were much better than before. The reports from the Baltics produced by T-kontoret increased from 10-20 per half-year to an average of 20-40 per half-year. The quality of the reports also improved (based on the scoring of the source and the message given by the Swedish Intelligence Service itself). The targets in the Baltics became more focused and the reports from Latvia followed by Estonia became more frequent than those from Lithuania, a fact that could have been influenced by Soviet immigration policies to the Baltic countries. In Latvia the focus was given to military targets, such as harbours and airports and the port in Liepaja and the airport Spilve outside Riga became top priorities. The thesis is based on documentation from the Swedish War Archives (Krigsarkivet) where access was given to the reports produced by T-kontoret from 1946 until 1953. We know from other sources that in 1957 the Soviet Union handed a protest note to the Swedish Government. The note was of course denied by the Swedes but after that the operations were ended both by the Swedes and the British Military Intelligence Services.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kau-158 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Ininbergs, Peteris |
| Publisher | Karlstads universitet, Institutionen för samhällsvetenskap |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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