Original subtitles

The following programme contains strong language

and scenes, which some viewers may find distressing.

Everybody's pointing the finger at the other guy saying, "He did it."

The eternal question that you have to keep in your head all the time is,

"Can I trust anybody?"

His murder remains unsolved.

The police did not talk to all the witnesses.

The country's current leader said

the murder was an open wound for the nation.

These boxes are the ones that actually changed everything.

The archive of Stieg Larsson.

For Stieg, it was not only a matter of solving a mystery.

To solve this murder will save the democracy of Sweden.

I began to wonder if Stieg thought

local fanatics were somehow

involved in the assassination.

I finally come to three really important dossiers.

Number one: Alf Enerstrom.

Described as Sweden's largest Palme-hater in Stieg's research.

We have Alf Enerstrom with an alibi

that no longer holds.

Viktor Gunnarsson, described as a far-right crackpot.

This is where the body was laid.

It appeared to be an execution.

This is the dossier on Bertil Wedin.

This was the real breakthrough.

Stieg felt that this man

could hold the key to the whole mystery.

I love Swedish coffee. It's stronger than anywhere else.

This will wake you up.

There are so many signs that this was not just a lone killer.

There's a lot pointing to an organised crime.

Stieg was looking at the possibility that local extremist fanatics,

really active in hate against Olof Palme,

may be involved in the murder of our Prime Minister.

It's pretty amazing. These people

that Stieg had researched and mapped out

and either handed in warnings

or they were in the vicinity of the killing that night

and they all mixed in to the same circles.

There was one dossier left

about the possible middleman, Bertil Wedin.

There's a huge amount of research put into this

by Stieg and by his contacts outside Sweden.

There's Wedin's passport, there are ID cards

and all of this they must have got in a way

that I can't really imagine how.

It was clear from the amount of detail and the number of pages

that this guy was of major importance to Stieg's investigation.

"Tip from a person with connections to the extreme right.

Rumour that W acted as a middleman

in the murder of Olof Palme."

I spent some time wondering what a middleman is.

That word, what does it mean?

It's actually a really interesting question.

What does a middleman do?

He facilitates.

He makes something possible, bringing

some different sides, some different parties together,

possibly to a common goal.

So in this dossier, there's a memo,

and Stieg has written this for his friend Gerry Gable in London.

It's several pages long

and it says, "Bertil Wedin was born in Sweden,

a right winger who was really active in the hate against Olof Palme,

but was last known to be living in Northern Cyprus.

Someone must have sneaked in to Bertil Wedin,

or maybe to the police in Northern Cyprus,

and somehow got their hands on these documents.

I began to see that Bertil Wedin may be connected

to all these threads that Stieg is investigating.

There was a possibility that he was working with the CIA,

and the Swedish secret police, and MI6 in the UK.

He was even associated with Stay Behind,

the secret resistance movement in Sweden,

created by the USA.

Stieg was clearly fascinated by Bertil Wedin,

so I got in touch with people who knew Stieg

to find out why.

Gerry was now quite old and ill,

but he was prepared to help me because of his compassion for Stieg.

Gerry gave me more contacts.

In the dossier, Stieg wrote this memo.

Previous sources claim that Wedin mainly

worked for the South African secret police

since the 1970s.

And I'm starting to wonder...

what has South Africa got to do with the murder

of a Swedish Prime Minister?

And how did Bertil Wedin fit into it all?

The people were simply no longer prepared to listen.

The government hoped it would end.

They wanted the people off the streets.

They wanted the children back in school.

They wanted the impossible.

There has never been a time like this.

There is a battle to fight and I will not stop.

I will not give up.

As long as this government is still in power, we must not stop.

As long as these people are still here,

we must not stop.

Africa at that time was a continent

almost at the beginning

of its major transition.

People were determined to...

break the chains of colonisation.

And in South Africa,

apartheid, that had become

the official policy of the country.

The best single illustration of apartheid

is to be seen at Johannesburg station.

Separate buses for whites and blacks,

separate railway stations, separate trains.

They've got no education and it'll take them

a couple of hundred years. They've only just come down from the trees.

Thousands of black South Africans

pour off the trains from the Soweto Township,

like any normal commuters, except that they have no choice.

No choice but to live in Soweto,

no choice but to go back there.

It's not racialistic

to wish and to desire to be yourself and to be your own.

We only wish to preserve, I say, what is dear to us.

Send our children to schools where they can be educated

in our ways of culture, just ours.

White supremacy had embedded itself

in the fabric of South African society.

Olof Palme became key

in the fight against apartheid.

Olof Palme was a sworn enemy of apartheid.

Many Africans are arrested in the slums.

Their oppression and racism

will never be included in a free world.

Minority rule is coming to an end

and Southern Africa is rapidly moving towards

an uncertain climax.

His government had been giving support

to the organised liberation movements,

like the African National Congress.

The sight of the corpses produced by apartheid violence...

...is the gruesome daily reply

for having dared to rise up

and demand freedom now.

That's Dad with Olof Palme.

That was the beginning of a revolution,

and I was there.

I mean, look, you can see from this picture

their delight in just being together.

Yeah. Sometimes, friendships are forged in fire.

My name is Dali Tambo.

My father, Oliver Tambo, was the president of the ANC,

the African National Congress.

My father would tell me about Olof Palme.

They were brothers. Brothers in arms, brothers in struggle.

They loved each other deeply.

He was a tremendous aide at a time when...

not every Western government

or European government was even interested.

I have will have nothing to do with any organisation

that practises violence. I've never seen anyone

from the ANC and would not do so.

The South African government is under no obligation

to negotiate the future of the country with any organisation

that uses terrorist tactics.

The time for gentlemanly politics was over.

We're not going to ask

to sit at the table. We're going to kick over the table.

We're not going to knock on any door. We're going to...

We're going to bang it open.

Sweden supports what it calls

national liberation movements, others calling them

guerrilla movements of the people. If I call them terrorists?

We have experienced that those who...

were called terrorists sooner or later

appear as responsible governments

that are recognised and hailed in the whole Western world.

He believed in our struggle.

He believed in our natural right...

...to fight for our freedom.

Sweden does sometimes seem a bit as if it wishes

to be the conscience of the world.

I always said that the liberation from colonialism

and racism of the African peoples

is a historic necessity.

Stieg's trail had now taken me to a whole new continent.

What started out with this dossier

about this Swedish right winger called Bertil Wedin...

...the possible middleman

and somehow led me to this horrendous regime,

racist regime in South Africa.

The more I looked through this material, the more I realised that

this wasn't only about the moral support Palme was giving

to the anti-apartheid groups.

This was also about money.

I could see that Palme's government

had a team involved in covert financial operations

to bring down the apartheid regime.

My name is Birgitta Karlstrom Dorph

and some people have called me

"Palme's secret agent."

My job was to find organisations

and people inside South Africa,

which we could support with money.

It was very dangerous

because the South Africa apartheid,

they wanted to get rid of people who were working

against the government.

I met Olof Palme.

I was very inspired by him. He was threatening

the state of South Africa

because of all this money we were able to get to South Africa.

My name is Birgitta Karlstrom Dorph,

and I am a Swedish diplomat.

I worked for 44 years for the Ministry for Foreign Affairs

in various conflicted countries, I could say.

I remember my first day in South Africa,

Sun went up... Nice smell, you know.

So I thought, "Hey, I must go out now."

Early, you know, it was a Sunday morning.

Then suddenly there's this bench, you know.

Wooden bench.

And it said, "Whites only."

And I spit on the bench.

You know, I usually don't go around spitting, you know?

But... ...that's what I felt like

Spit at it.

I thought, "Hey, I must now contribute,

so there won't be any benches like this in South Africa."

I met people, ask them to write down

what they wanted, what they were doing,

detailed budgets,

and via secret messages we have all over the world.

I sent them to the government organisation

under the Ministry for Foreign Affairs.

They had a small office in Stockholm

and then they had a list on which organisations

can be given resistance support.

But the Swedish government couldn't send money directly

to organisations inside South Africa.

So the Swedish government put money into an account

in Switzerland.

The people in the resistance

went to Switzerland, took the money out,

and the money he or she had

was given to an organisation inside South Africa.

And it worked.

We were trying to send the money in various ways.

For example, the Swedish church could then send

to a church in South Africa, many various ways.

If the South African government had known about this,

they would not have been pleased, to say the least.

So that was very secret and there were very few people

who knew about it.

I remember going to Sweden

and a young woman who was the representative

of the government gave me 100,000 rand.

I had a double-breasted fawn suit.

I don't even know whether the colour is known today anymore.

We opened up the lining

and we stuffed the money all around the inside

of the jacket and sewed it up again at the airport.

They make you walk through that thing that goes off.

I just simply took the jacket off and casually

threw it on the table on that side and walked through.

Let them pat me down,

hoping that they wouldn't look.

And they didn't.

"From the time Olof Palme was elected

Prime Minister in 1969,

the Swedish assistance for the freedom fight in Africa

was roughly $1 billion."

I honestly do not think that any other country matched

those financial contributions.

Olof Palme was the driving force,

not only in the humanitarian aid,

but also in the covert military assistance.

Palme must have known that some of that money

that the ANC was getting in those earlier years

was to buy guns or train people

for military action.

Today, the gutted homes

of local town councillors are visual proof of the Government's failure

to protect their own, and the mobs wreaked a terrible vengeance

on anyone co-operating with the apartheid system of government.

We can make a difference...

...in our country, right now.

We are fighting a battle

and we are winning.

It depends on you.

The apartheid regime's greatest threat

was a massive tide of anti-apartheid activity,

which was coalescing and coming together...

...because of Olof Palme.

The sanctions that were gaining internationally,

their moral justification that was crumbling,

their political authority that was crumbling.

And they knew that internally,

they would not be able to break the resistance.

If you put all of that together, by 1985,

they had to announce the first state of emergency.

This state of affairs can no longer be tolerated.

For 36 districts in South Africa,

the security forces yesterday became the rule of law.

Emergency legislation that allows them

to arrest anyone without a warrant,

imprison them without access to a lawyer,

and seal off townships at will.

It was very dangerous for many people, especially those

who were actively working against the government.

Freedom is not real.

We are going to have a freedom of which we're gonna be proud.

I remember once, when I was at home,

when I came out into the hall,

there was something on the floor.

There was a bullet on the floor.

Yeah. I'm not used to seeing bullets.

And then I looked up and there was a hole in the window.

I asked my friends, you know, "What is this now?

I mean, what did they...?" 'Ah, they just want to say that,

"We know where you are and following what you're doing

with Olof Palme.'"

Stieg's files, it's like a huge puzzle

where you have a million pieces that don't belong,

and I'm trying to pick out the right ones that really fit together.

Stieg had put in an incredible amount of work into this.

All his free time and weekends,

holidays, staying up late nights,

holed up in his apartment.

I think Stieg was obsessed with exposing the culprits.

And he even wrote about the murder in all of his novels.

It can literally eat you up. And that's what happened to me.

I spent ten years on this.

As I dug deeper,

I could see the South Africans' political motives

to kill our Prime Minister.

Palme saw to it that Sweden was financing

the ANC with 50% of its budget

to try and bring down the apartheid regime,

which, at the time, had the full backing

of Western governments like the US and Britain.

But I still didn't know how Bertil Wedin was connected

to the murder of Olof Palme.

Did he really fit into this?

When I was reading through the papers in the dossier,

I found that from the late 70s and the early 80s...

...Bertil Wedin was travelling back and forth from South Africa,

but he spent the majority of his time

residing in London and Stockholm.

So I began to wonder,

why would the apartheid regime need a man

on the other side of the world, based in Europe?

My name is Madi Gray

and I'm a former ANC activist.

I moved to Sweden in 1974.

Many members had to leave South Africa

and to build up

anti-apartheid support in the rest of the world.

We did everything that needed to be done,

making contacts and talking to politicians and...

trade unionists and other people of influence.

The solidarity organisations were terribly important

in building up support.

That is enough to show

that the people of the world,

they have had enough of the oppressors.

Places like London and Stockholm

had a lot of power,

which the South African

secret services became aware of.

In Sweden, we had a break-in

at the ANC office.

Files were obviously... several of them were rifled through.

The ANC office phone was tapped

and then they...

became more radical.

There was the bombing of the ANC offices

in Penton Street in London.

The bomb contained enough explosives to kill

or cause serious injury.

In Paris, our mission head there at the time

she was assassinated.

Dulcie September, she was killed in Paris.

She was shot in the back, yeah.

Black nationalist supporters believe that

their increasingly militant stand against apartheid has made them

prime targets for the South African government and its agents.

There was a bomb that was hung on the door

of the ANC office in Stockholm,

which exploded, a pretty heavy bomb.

Clearly,

borders meant nothing to them.

London, Paris, Stockholm.

All targeted.

I could see why South African operatives were on European soil.

So is this how Stieg thought Bertil Wedin

was connected to the regime's operation?

Did he believe Bertil was helping

the apartheid's European hit squads?

I managed to meet and speak with one of the South Africans

that carried out the bombing in London:

Vic McPherson.

By following Stieg's archive, I had entered this world

of spies and agents and murders.

And now I was talking

to a real South African operative.

This was a pivotal moment.

Was Stieg's alleged middleman in Palme's assassination

actually working for the apartheid regime?

I had to find out.

Suddenly Stieg Larsson's theory stands up.

There's a definite link between South Africa

and Bertil Wedin, the alleged middleman.

But it didn't stop there.

I managed to get specifics about who exactly in South Africa

Bertil Wedin had been working with.

I'm thinking, fucking hell.

Major Craig Williamson,

known as the apartheid regime's superspy.

A man behind some of its most brutal and violent acts,

but who had also spent years undercover

pretending to be part of the anti-apartheid movement.

I was involved in a war.

And in a war people get killed.

And in a war, people get bombed.

Craig Williamson is probably the most famous

spy that infiltrated...

the African National Congress.

A killer of several anti-apartheid figures,

their families and even their children.

Testimony by Craig Williamson.

He acknowledges the killing

of Ruth First by a letter bomb.

He also admitted to the killing

Jeanette Schoon and her six-year-old daughter.

I met Craig Williamson.

He's persuasive

and he can turn black into white and you'll believe him.

I estimate it would take no longer than a month,

maybe six weeks,

to physically eliminate the ANC.

Hunt them down, catch them, shoot them.

There was a time when he was getting an award, Craig Williamson,

from the South African regime

for his murderous acts.

And the minister giving him the award said to him,

"I don't know if I should shake your hands.

There's so much blood on them."

Then they had a laugh and went and drank brandy.

We were fighting something that we believed in, an ideological war.

He was a rodent.

A snake.

One of the foulest individuals

that has walked this earth.

Sorry if I'm getting outraged. I always do

when I speak of people like that, because,

you know, I feel like vomiting

at the sound of their names.

At the destruction. Wilful.

Evil.

Stieg had identified this horrendous regime.

They are prepared to blow bombs in London

to kill people that are threatening their existence.

And one of the top guys, Craig Williamson,

was definitely working with Bertil Wedin.

I'm beginning to get the feeling that I'm coming closer to the truth.

Immediately after the murder, there were several tips

to the police about Wedin, and they kept coming in.

And despite that,

through the years, the police had never questioned Bertil Wedin.

But someone had to do it. Someone had to try.

I couldn't give up now.

Reading through the files, I saw that Bertil Wedin

and applied to state in Northern Cyprus,

to a place where he couldn't be extradited from.

To actually get much further in this investigation,

I could only see one way.

I had to go to Cyprus.

I need to create a cover story. I become...

Fredrik Bengtson, freelance journalist,

working for the Swedish newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet.

And my pitch to Bertil Wedin will be,

"I want to do a story on your life."

I spent two days before I actually

dared to even try to find him.

I went to the local post office,

looked through the phone book, and I found two phone numbers to him.

I jotted down the numbers

Back at the hotel, in my pretty worn-down hotel room,

I sat down...

...and dialled one of the numbers.

And suddenly I was much more nervous.

In Stieg's memo, it says he's dangerous.

After a few rings, there is a voice on the other end.

'Hello?' And I say, 'Good morning.

Am I speaking to Bertil Wedin?'

And he says, 'That depends on who's asking.'

'I'm Fredrik Bengtson. I'm a freelance journalist.

I would love to do a story on your life.'

Wedin's response:

"Do you want to talk about the Palme assassination?"

Wedin's interested. I arranged to meet him

at the Dome Hotel the next day at 11:00.

I wanted to film him, so I went to buy this

tiny video-recording spy pen.

I knew I was taking a chance, but I was prepared to take that risk.

I had the virus, the Palme virus.

He's exactly what I expected.

He's extremely well-dressed.

He's got a posture straight as a board,

and his face doesn't show any emotions.

That is not half a litre.

I told Wedin that I have a dossier

that Stieg Larsson prepared on him, and he wants to see it.

I deliberately don't show the dossier to Wedin

until I have asked all the questions.

I needed to know if anything that Stieg had written about him

was remotely true.

I wanted to know if he had worked for the South African Security police,

the Swedish secret police SAPO, or the CIA.

He confirmed several things from the dossier.

He confirmed that he was working for the South African security forces,

including Craig Williamson.

He confirmed that he had been working for the CIA.

He confirmed that he had been working for the Swedish Security Police.

So suddenly Stieg Larsson's research was right.

And finally I show it to him.

He reads through the dossier.

The atmosphere starts to change.

And suddenly he seems suspicious.

And suddenly I start to get really nervous.

I try to end the meeting as quickly as possible.

I get out of the meeting, go to my hotel room,

get my belongings, take a taxi to the airport,

and take the first flight out of Northern Cyprus.

I can't believe it.

I had questioned Bertil Wedin.

I had done what the Swedish police

hadn't managed to do in three decades.

Stieg's research was absolutely right.

Bertil Wedin was a man with connections

to so many of the groups that Stieg was investigating.

CIA in the US,

Stay Behind inside Sweden,

and the South African Secret Service

during the reign of the apartheid regime.

He was also a Swedish right winger

who didn't hide his hate for Olof Palme,

much like Alf Enerstrom and Viktor Gunnarsson.

So if South Africa were to use a top agent,

Craig Williamson, to organise the assassination of Olof Palme...

...Bertil Wedin would have made the perfect middleman

to connect them to others who could help.

But one thing Stieg was never able to do

was to place either Bertil Wedin or Craig Williamson

in Stockholm, near to the scene of the crime

around the time of the murder.

Because by February 1986,

Bertil Wedin was supposed to be in Northern Cyprus,

and Craig Williamson, he was more than...

8,000 miles away in South Africa...

...or so he claimed.

So here we have Sweden's Prime Minister,

Olof Palme with Oliver Tambo.

This is taken one week prior to the murder

when there was a conference in Stockholm.

Oh, I remember very clearly.

I was there in Stockholm.

At the end, there was resounding applause

that went on for quite a few minutes.

While people were applauding, I ran out.

And I went to another entrance.

And I stood there, expecting my friend to come out.

While I'm standing waiting,

I see someone completely different.

We make eye contact...

...nod "hello" to each other,

and then we went... ..startled,

because this is Craig Williamson.

Williamson shouldn't have been there by this time.

In Sweden, he's known as The Spy.

I got a very cold feeling.

I really got a very cold feeling.

And of course, a week later,

Olof Palme was assassinated.

When we heard that the South Africans'

security police may have been involved,

we say, "Yeah, absolutely."

But of course, it's one of those things

that probably never will be

proved one way or the other.

Who believes in coincidences? It was obvious.

I felt I was starting to see the key players

in Stieg's main theory.

The South Africans are planning the murder

with someone like possibly Craig Williamson.

But they needed a middleman in Europe

in order to help facilitate the operation.

His job was to bring South African interests together

with someone or something else.

But the question was:

who or what?

I knew I would need to find out

if I was going to prove Stieg's theory.

I was standing at a crossroad with two choices ahead of me.

I knew that I could go and maybe solve the Palme murder...

...but I would have to do things that would cross many lines.

Or I can go on and lead my normal life.

But I felt that I had come so far.

There was no way turning back.

He had been inside my computer.

Somebody needs to tell him to shut up.

I'm convinced that Stieg Larsson would have done it.

I have friends...

that can do interesting things.

And then the prosecutor steps up and says:

"We have solved the murder.

We will present the solution." Now we know the killer.

Everybody is waiting for what the police will say.

Today we will get the truth.

This is the day.

No way. No fucking way.

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