Original subtitles

The Prime Minister of Sweden, Mr Olof Palme, has been assassinated.

(SIREN)

I'm not a detective or a journalist.

But the police, they're not doing anything.

So someone else has to, because it's still an unsolved murder.

These boxes are the ones that actually changed everything.

The archive of Stieg Larsson.

Sweden's most famous crime novelist

has spent ten years trying to solve the murder

of our prime minister.

The police did not talk to all the witnesses.

(MAN SPEAKS IN SWEDISH)

There were witnesses that saw men with walkie-talkies

in the night of the murder.

There were a number of tip-offs to the police

that came before the murder.

Ivan Von Birchan, a mercenary from Yugoslavia.

I knew I had to pull at the threads that Stieg Larsson left behind.

(RINGING TONE)

Yes. Hello. My name is Jan Stocklassa.

Am I talking to Ivan Von Birchan?

This is the murder weapon we are looking for.

It's a revolver Smith Wesson .357.

I don't know what to believe, really.

Ivan Von Birchan, in the month before the murder,

said that he called the police

and said that he had been offered money

by a person that he thought was working for the CIA

to shoot Olof Palme.

Stieg actually did research on Ivan Von Birchan.

It's pretty obvious that the police didn't trust

what Ivan Von Birchan was saying.

But it's also clear that Stieg Larsson was much more open-minded.

He wanted to explore any possible US motive

or links to its intelligence services.

Classified CIA document. This is pretty amazing, actually.

I genuinely have no idea where he got that from.

It's a 19-page report

that describes historical assassination and examples.

The CIA actually instructed how they should assassinate people.

In lost assassination,

an assassination where the assassin himself is sacrificial,

he can get caught himself or die in the process.

The assassin must be a fanatic of some sort.

Politics, religion and revenge are the only feasible motives.

If a pistol is used, it should be as powerful as possible

and fired from just beyond reach.

The .357 Magnum is an efficient calibre.

That's exactly the calibre that was used

when Olof Palme was killed.

Stieg had a huge amount of research on the CIA.

They were funding organisations overseas

that were working against left-wing governments.

They were financing anti-communist guerrillas.

Stieg was looking at secret American operations

on foreign soil.

But the big question was,

would they have really been active within Sweden?

Deep down in Stieg's boxes, there's another folder

that says Stay Behind.

Stay Behind is a movement or an organisation that doesn't exist

and still exists,

a secret organisation that's active inside Sweden.

It's sort of a paramilitary organisation

founded by the CIA that should be passive in peacetime

and be activated in wartime.

When it's activated, it can fight against the enemy,

even if the country is occupied.

Stieg was actually researching this

much before anybody knew about it.

They had access to guns, explosives,

and they were also trained in combat and sabotage

and stuff like that,

things that would be effective against the enemy.

An American secret resistance movement inside Sweden.

It sounded almost too strange to be true.

Without a shadow of a doubt, Stay Behind was absolutely real

because my father set up the Stay Behind network.

These are photographs from our family collection.

Winter time.

My brother, my sister, myself, my mother looking very chic.

My father probably on a little picnic outskirts of Stockholm,

pretending to be on some little...

expedition to get cakes or something,

because he probably was delivering something.

Taking a risk, actually, riding with his children and his wife. Hm.

Makes for a better cover, though. Totally better.

We sometimes wonder, was our whole life a cover?

My name is Carl Colby.

I'm the son of William Colby, who was the former head of the CIA.

When he reported at CIA headquarters in 1950,

my father brought a certain amount of gravitas.

His war record was stellar, and he gravitated almost effortlessly

into the paramilitary operational crowd.

Then they moved to Stockholm.

Part of my father's mission was to set up Stay Behind networks,

make sure they're functioning, and it takes a bit of skill to do that.

His cover as first political secretary was perfect,

and with his lovely brunette wife, three of us children,

props in a way. You know, we're a nice little family.

Yeah, we would go off on a car trip,

but sometimes my father would meet somebody

and then my father would hand them something.

And we didn't ask him what he's doing

and we weren't introduced to him.

So there was this subterfuge going on.

If my father had any theme in his life: things are not what they seem.

Stay Behind network was operating throughout the world.

The setting that up was done in tandem

with a very aggressive attitude on the part of the Americans

with several of the top CIA operational people.

Americans were terrified that countries like Sweden

would just be occupied by the Soviets, Communists or sympathisers.

Stay Behind networks were made up of

mostly people who had had experience in the underground.

Small groups of people operating in secrecy.

There was a great deal of interest in taking guerrilla action.

Swedes, who were very disciplined, very well trained.

I heard that there was some practising going on

the night that the Prime Minister was killed.

Well, that seems like it could be more than coincidence.

This was against everything I knew about Sweden before.

Sweden is supposed to be neutral. We're supposed to be non-aligned.

And suddenly we have a superpower

that has created a secret resistance movement inside Sweden.

Stieg thought that the Stay Behind attracted a special type of people,

people that were actually quite extreme in their views.

People who would definitely hate Olof Palme,

who thought he was far too left wing,

that he was too weak on communism and that he was ruining Sweden.

And within the files there are signed witness statements

that say that known Swedish Stay Behind members

were spotted in the area that same night

before and after Olof Palme was killed.

It's close to incredible that the CIA

would even care about Olof Palme

but the US start to see him as a real problem.

It's something that started during the Vietnam War.

15 years ago, North Vietnam,

with the logistical support of communist China

and the Soviet Union, launched a campaign

to impose a communist government on South Vietnam

by instigating and supporting a revolution.

The United States furnished most of the money,

most of the arms and most of the men

to help those countries defend their freedom

against communist aggression.

Olof Palme was really loud and critical of the Vietnam War.

Many in the US started to feel that Olof Palme was anti-American.

In a sense equating the American bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong

with Nazi atrocities.

Do you think in looking back on that statement

that perhaps it went too far?

No, I think in the sense I said it it was correct

because what I was comparing weren't systems or regimes.

They were symbols of violence.

I thought of the suffering people in these circumstances.

So from Stieg's files, I could see that Olof Palme's stance on Vietnam

had really started to anger the US.

He had even marched against the war

together with the North Vietnamese ambassador.

Palme was the only prime minister in the world

who managed to actually upset the US to the extent

that they called back their ambassador twice from Sweden.

(CONTINUOUS TONE)

From reading Stieg's files, I could see what started in Vietnam

continued throughout the Cold War.

The Cold War period was very tense.

It was about ideology and also about, of course, weapons

and threats of mass destruction and the fear of a nuclear war.

We all know the atomic bomb is very dangerous

and since it may be used against us, we must get ready for it.

It would be a chess game, if there were rules.

But the very essence of conflict is that all the rules are abolished.

The Americans were defending Europe

against pressure from the Soviet army,

which had something like 40,000 armoured vehicles,

a lot of steel waiting to roll forward.

So that is what the Cold War was about.

It was a battle for control of the world.

My name is Edward Luttwak

and I am a strategic advisor of the US Government,

and I have been for a very long time.

Political leaders knew very well Sweden's importance.

If the Soviets took Sweden, that would mean,

practically speaking, it's almost impossible to reinforce Europe.

But there was this prime minister

who was shouting all these anti-American things.

Palme was not helpful.

He was emotionally anti-American.

He would play footsie with Castro.

(CROWD RESPONDS)

And Palme overlooked all of that

because Castro had the supreme virtue

of being colourfully anti-America.

When Reagan came to power, he said to the Soviet Union,

we're going to outbuild you on intermediate-range nuclear weapons.

To be able to push and hold back the big Soviet army.

This armament is a crucial and most urgent problem of our time.

Even though Palme was a Western person, he was an irritant.

Olof Palme was a thorn in the side of the US.

Here's this prime minister from a tiny country

in the north of the world

who suddenly starts to mix in the large world politics.

You have the US on one side,

Soviet Union on the other side,

and Olof Palme in the middle.

So this is where it gets pretty crazy.

Just as you get your head around the fact

that the Americans would have wanted him gone,

you find a trail that goes in a completely opposite direction.

There were so many times that I started to wonder,

what kind of world have I entered?

Within the official paperwork, there are tip-offs

and even sworn statements coming in from spies,

military intelligence and even politicians,

saying there was a deliberate attempt

to focus attention towards the USA

to hide Soviet involvement in the assassination.

The theory about the CIA being behind the murder of Olof Palme

was typical of Soviet disinformation.

My name is Joakim Von Braun.

I worked 25 years as a covert intelligence asset

for the Swedish security police, the Swedish counter espionage,

and the Swedish military intelligence.

If the Soviets were able to influence or control Sweden,

it would be an enormous strategic coup for them.

Sweden was a very important part of Europe.

If you look at the map, you would see

that the length of Sweden constitutes about 50%

of the length of Europe.

If you are going to conquer Europe, you really have to deal with Sweden.

My name is Svante Winqvist

and I'm a former Swedish intelligence agent

focused on Soviet intelligence.

We took the threat of a Soviet attack seriously.

The goal of the Soviet Union was to spread communism

all over the world.

We knew that the Soviets had plans to invade Sweden

sooner or later.

And then came the submarine incursions.

NEWSREADER: A Soviet submarine is stranded

off the southern coast of Sweden near the country's main naval base

of Karlskrona.

The Swedish authorities say they are almost certain

the Soviet submarine was carrying at least one nuclear warhead.

I was involved in the decision making

when Soviet submarines were discovered in Swedish waters.

It's unclear when the submarine will be handed back to the Soviet Union.

This depends on whether the Swedish Government

is satisfied with the results

of the Swedish Navy's investigation of the incident.

We caught them red-handed or as we say in Swedish,

we caught them... (SPEAKS SWEDISH) ...with the trousers down.

The submarine continues to be a source of embarrassment

to Russian authorities.

The Soviets said bad weather and faulty navigational equipment

led the vessel into Swedish territorial waters.

There were further submarine violations in 1982,

in 1984, in 1986.

The Soviets had planned to demolish democracy.

Prime Minister Olof Palme

was very critical against the Soviet Union.

It was Prime Minister Palme himself

that took up the Russian ambassador

and actually was quite, quite harsh against him.

I knew because I heard it. He was very, very sharp.

Sweden with all possible strength

will defend its territorial integrity.

If the intrusions would continue, we will get hold of the submarine

and force it up to the surface or destroy it.

We started to cooperate clandestinely

with the United States. So we were officially neutral,

but made the necessary things for our own survival.

Olof was instrumental

in arranging the security arrangement with the US.

We had this arrangement that

if we were under attack or at risk of being attacked,

the US would immediately come.

I think the Russians got so furious that they wanted to kill him.

The same night as the murder takes place,

there was a bugging going on.

The bug had been planted by the Swedes

in cooperation probably with the CIA

in a Russian diplomat's residence.

This bugging had us a result,

a conversation between him and his wife.

The bugging was recorded,

and on one of these tapes,

one can hear that the officer is expressing himself

as knowing that Palme would be murdered.

And we see that as a kind of proof

that the KGB and the Russian embassy

knew about the murder beforehand.

Do you know what he said? No, I can't say more about this

because now we are touching very sensitive matters.

So you have the CIA and the US on one side

and you have the KGB and the Soviets on the other.

So everybody's pointing the finger at the other guy,

saying he did it. And the eternal question that you have,

that you have to keep in your head all the time is, who do I trust?

Can I trust anybody?

But whatever you think, this backdrop of East and West,

communism and capitalism, is incredibly important.

In this era of superpowers and polarised politics,

it's also playing out on the streets,

far left, far right.

There were all kinds of extremists.

And on the right, many were aligning themselves

with the American anti-communists.

And I remember the key thing from the assassination handbook,

by the CIA, that Stieg had kept.

The assassin must be a fanatic of some sort.

Looking at his research, there was definitely

no shortage of extremist groups in Sweden at that time.

And he was mapping all of this out.

I began to wonder if Stieg thought extremists,

local fanatics, were somehow involved in the assassination.

(READS IN SWEDISH) "Palme-Hate."

It was a phenomenon that it was...

I would say the first time we had a politician that was that hated.

The right-wing extremists were there building up this hate

against Olof Palme.

He was treated as a traitor.

One of the ideas was actually that Olof Palme

was going to Moscow in April

and there he would sell out Sweden to the Soviet Union

and we would become part of the Soviet Union.

So they thought that he was a traitor.

The people that hated him, they wanted him removed.

Some of them wanted him peacefully removed.

Some of them wanted him dead.

And that was a phenomenon that had been going on

almost since Palme started his political career.

I think there's animosity against all politicians,

but with Olof Palme it was something different.

It became known as... (SPEAKS SWEDISH) ..Palme-Hate.

This is, for instance, a letter.

There is someone writing directly to Palme

without greeting him. Just says "Palme!

We will get rid of you. We will shoot you."

Then it ends, "PS You can start counting your days."

This is a pretty typical drawing of him with his nose.

He had a big nose, but they exaggerated the nose

and made his eyes look evil.

And he was supposed to be some sort of...

sent out by the Devil to destroy Sweden.

It was late Sixties.

The hate became very strong.

I have one memory. I was going skiing in Austria

and I had spotted some Swedes, a Swedish family.

The kids were coming up in the ski lift

and saw me coming down and then they shouted very loudly:

(SPEAKS SWEDISH)

They had no relation to my father

and didn't have a clue about politics,

but they were sort of growing up

in this kind of atmosphere where this hate

was extraordinary.

When he first entered politics,

the political right reacted very strongly against that.

The way that they described him, his personality

and his physical appearance...

I mean, he was portrayed as a traitor of the country.

And these things were sort of

nurtured in top circles in society.

And then that eventually took, of course, much nastier turns.

It was organised. It was funded.

They were collecting money to get rid of Olof Palme.

Stieg was working with another journalist called Hakan.

In one of his diaries there was a meeting

and I found a letter Stieg had written to him.

"What I'm working on right now is trying to map out

the organizations in this swamp once and for all.

Trying to untangle all the addresses, post office..."

"..boxes, phone numbers, cross connections and all that.

At first glance, the whole field

looks like an illogical ball of yarn..."

In 1987, I was approached by my editors

to start looking at Palme-Hatred.

I quite quickly got a tip

from a person in Stockholm

that if you go into right-wing extremism,

you should contact a guy.

His name was Stieg Larsson.

After talking to Stieg, the first time in his quite humble flat

here in the suburb of Stockholm...

We sat smoking and drinking coffee in the nights.

We both were quite young.

He had a tremendous grip

on right-wing extremism in general,

nationally and internationally, and a knowledge of persons.

What struck me was that he was...

intelligent, intense,

but very humble as a person.

He was emotionally engaged in the subject.

He did not like neo-Nazis.

He did not like racists.

There were hours of hours of talking, discussing,

comparing notes.

It was all-engulfing, but it was systematised.

It was structured.

That was the assignment:

don't hunt a murderer, hunt the origins of hatred against Palme.

All the groups, all the connections,

between different people

and how it expressed itself

and how it was organised.

I was deep into Stieg's files.

Looking at all these extremist groups,

I finally come to three really important dossiers,

three names, three people, that keep coming back

in the groups that Stieg is investigating.

Number one, Alf Enerstrom,

described as Sweden's largest Palme-Hater in Stieg's research.

Victor Gunnarsson, described as a far-right crackpot.

Bertil Wedin, a member of several of the organisations

that Stieg Larsson was mapping out.

This is when I think Stieg's investigation

becomes really focused.

It's impossible to ignore the extent of the research

that Stieg has put into these three people.

There's so much detail, so many facts,

so many things that he was looking into.

There were press clippings, there were travel arrangements,

there were scans of passports.

So I began to read these detailed memos,

starting with Alf Enerstrom, Sweden's largest Palmer-Hater.

So Alf Enerstrom was collecting money

from influential business people

to run campaigns against Olof Palme.

His long-term partner was Gio Petre, a well-known actress.

(AUTOMATIC GUNFIRE)

They were comparing Olof Palme to Adolf Hitler,

and the only possible punishment was death.

So if there ever was a symbol for the Palme-Hatred, this was it.

The intensity of the threats

that they were directing against Olof Palme,

nothing was comparable to this.

Alf Enerstrom had an alibi for the time of the murder.

He had been at home with his partner Gio Petre

and she backed that up too.

So the first person I wanted to look for was Alf Enerstrom.

Where was he now? Would he even speak to me,

three decades after the murder?

What did he know about that night?

So since 1986, I found out Enerstrom had hit financial problems.

He had shot at a policewoman,

and his relationship with Gio Petre had ended.

I wanted to meet with him. I managed to track down Enerstrom

and I need to create a cover story.

I was now a newspaper journalist, and he agreed to meet with me,

and I decided I would record everything.

I found an office space in Stockholm.

I put up a curtain, put a chair in front of it,

a camera, some recording equipment.

So we sit down,

camera's rolling, and we start talking.

So I'm thinking,

if it's true what he's telling me, this is really big.

Not only does he say that he knows who did it,

but he's also saying that there was police involvement.

Stieg has been looking into this.

There were known extremists within the police that hated Palme.

And at this stage I'm thinking...

is this a person that I can trust?

Until this moment,

he had always maintained that he had an alibi,

that he was at his apartment in another part of Stockholm.

And now suddenly he's telling me that he was on Sveavagen.

So I'm being thrown between what are lies,

what's the truth?

Is he making this up now?

Does he really believe it himself?

It seems all to be a mix... all to be a mix of everything.

But his alibi was backed up by Gio Petre, his partner.

So now I needed to track her down.

JAN:

GIO:

JAN:

GIO:

JAN:

So this is crucial.

We have Alf Enerstrom, the number one Palme-Hater,

with an alibi that no longer holds,

saying that he was on Sveavagen that night,

suggesting police involvement in the murder.

I wanted to know more.

So I requested all the material I could have from the police,

and they sent me quite a lot, actually.

And then I found something else.

And the funny part is I don't think they wanted to send this to me.

It's a Post-it Note from someone at SAPO,

the Swedish security police.

(READS IN SWEDISH)

The whole Enerstrom line of inquiry

from the secret police side, SAPO, is considered closed.

Despite everything that was pointing towards Enerstrom,

they say, don't look at it.

Alf Enerstrom always denied any involvement in the murder.

But from what he told me, I believe there's much more to it.

I think he was part of a conspiracy.

Maybe not the shooter, but I think he knew those involved,

sympathised with their motives and was there that night.

So now there are only two dossiers left

and it was time to read about the person

that Stieg Larsson called the far-right crackpot.

So this is a letter from Stieg.

And you can see that Stieg is really excited because the...

The police have brought in Victor Gunnarsson,

"an obvious far-right crackpot.

He has a record of obsession with the prime minister,

several times suggesting he ought to be shot

and known to tag along to wherever Palme went,

to public meetings and rallies."

So in the official investigation documents,

on the night that Olof Palme was shot,

Victor Gunnarsson told two young girls

that in Stockholm you can be shot in the back for your opinions.

When he's picked up by the police and they examine his jacket,

they find gunpowder residue.

Victor Gunnarsson had been questioned early on by the police

after various tip-offs.

At this stage in the investigation,

there is a lot pointing towards Gunnarsson.

What he continues to write is,

"Then only hours before he would go to a preliminary court,

Gunnarsson was released."

So now I'm wondering, where is he now

and what secrets may he be holding?

I had worked at the Sheriff's Department for Watauga County

since 1986, and I was at the rank of Detective Sergeant.

It was a cold, bitter Friday in January of 1994

and was hoping just to get some paperwork done in the office

and have a quiet day.

But then the call came in that a survey crew

had found a dead body in the woods.

Everything was covered in snow.

The wind was really hard.

The snow was probably six, eight inches deep.

About right here we could see two adult feet

sticking up out of the snow.

It was a nude male and he was Caucasian.

He had a gunshot wound to his left temple

and to the right side of his neck.

The fact that he was bound

indicated that he had been kidnapped and transported to this area.

It appeared to be perhaps an execution.

Ultimately, we were able to get Interpol involved,

which allowed us to positively confirm that

the man whose body we found in the woods here on January 7th

was indeed the body of a Swedish citizen,

Victor Gunnarsson.

This is actually Victor's apartment

as we found it when we first entered.

He kept everything. He... Even his junk mail.

And then his bedroom was full of books and magazines.

This was found in Victor Gunnarsson's apartment.

And it's Swedish for "Who shot Olof Palme?"

The author believes that Victor Gunnarsson was the assassin.

And each chapter has a different reason why.

I did speak multiple times with some Swedish investigators.

Swedish police officers.

It seems everybody in Sweden had a different opinion

about the assassination.

There are many who believe Victor Gunnarsson

assassinated the Prime Minister.

Victor Gunnarsson I know personally.

I have social contacts with him. Yes.

Victor Gunnarsson was killed because he knew who killed Olof.

And it's very possible that Victor Gunnarsson

was asked to kill Olof Palme.

So Victor Gunnarsson had met this pretty weird, very brutal end

in the USA.

We know he was in the area. So was it really just a coincidence,

another right-wing Palme-hating fanatic was there near the scene,

or was there much more going on?

But there was one dossier remaining.

This was the real breakthrough.

This is the dossier on Bertil Wedin,

described by Stieg as a middleman in the assassination.

Stieg felt that he could hold the key to the whole mystery.

I could never have imagined where this would take me.

The bomb contained enough explosives to kill or cause serious injury.

We say we should forgive and forget.

I'll never forgive them for killing Olof Palme.

I'll never forget it.

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