Original subtitles

'The following programme contains strong language.'

(ON TV) "The Prime Minister of Sweden, Mr Olof Palme,

has been assassinated."

'Stieg Larsson. I spent ten years trying to solve the murder

of our Prime Minister.'

MAN: The police did not talk to all the witnesses.

There are so many signs that this was actually an organised crime.

The apartheid regime, its greatest threat was a massive tide

of anti-apartheid activity because of Olof Palme.

Alf Enerstrom, he was Sweden's largest Palme hater.

But this was the real breakthrough.

This is the dossier on Bertil Wedin.

Stieg Larsson was right. Bertil Wedin was

the perfect middleman in the murder of our Swedish prime minister.

I felt like I was starting to see Stieg's main theory.

The South Africans wanted to get rid of Olof Palme

because of political motives.

There was a middleman in Europe who connected them with someone or

some group to help in the assassination.

But who or what I didn't know.

And I'm convinced Stieg would have solved the murder.

He would have gone all the way if he had lived.

If I was going to prove Stieg Larsson's theory,

I knew I had to start digging deeper around South Africa

and their secret operatives.

Over three decades later, with apartheid gone, would anyone talk?

I managed to meet and speak with Vic McPherson,

who had helped carry out the bombing in London

for the South African apartheid regime.

REPORTER: "A man who works for the ANC as a researcher was

inside the building, but only slightly hurt.

He managed to escape through a second floor window."

I tried to find out if there was anything else

he would tell me about their secret operations.

Possibly the Olof Palme assassination.

When it came to South Africa,

I was having difficulty getting any new information.

This world of spies and agents and murders,

it's all about who you know.

You had to be careful about your security.

You need someone with connections.

And there's one person who has better contacts than anyone else.

(LINE RINGS)

Oh, Goran. How are you doing?

This is Jan calling from Sweden.

I was in South Africa.

Take care. OK.

I met Jan Stocklassa in 2015 because we had a shared interest

in the Palme case and we've kept the contact ever since.

I am Goran Bjorkdahl.

I was a Swedish diplomat in Africa for 15 years.

I had no intention to look at the Palme case.

But in May 2014 I had a dinner with a journalist in Pretoria,

and at the end of the dinner he said, I have some documents

that I think you should look at regarding the Olof Palme case.

I took them and I started reading when I came into my hotel room

and I just couldn't stop.

They are copies of what is claimed to be official documents,

top-secret documents from the military intelligence.

They are sometimes called the deep search papers.

And in these documents it is written that the State Security Council

of South Africa branded Olof Palme an Enemy of the State,

which is practically a death sentence.

The deep search documents come from a time when apartheid had just ended.

The situation was quite chaotic

and some people started selling documents,

maybe even faking documents.

So at first when I read it, I was a little bit sceptical.

I had to know whether these documents are authentic.

I handed over the deep search papers and asked for his comment.

So this is when I realised Stieg's theory.

The South African security forces were working together

with Swedish right wingers and extremists.

Fanatics.

Bertil Wedin, originally from Sweden,

he is the middleman and he brings them all together.

I now needed to refocus my efforts on the fanatics in Sweden.

And there was one name I couldn't forget.

Alf Enerstrom, Sweden's largest Palme hater.

I had found out that his alibi was not valid.

He had told me several important things.

He had told me how he was asked to fund the murder.

He had told me he was in Sveavagen that night, and he had told me

that he knew who was behind the murder.

So I wanted to go back to Alf Enerstrom to see

if I could find out more.

But when I tried to arrange to meet him again, I find out

that he has passed away.

I had hit another dead end.

I needed to go back to my notes, to the documents.

Stieg had a lot on Alf Enerstrom. It's so interesting.

I had found out that there was some sort of mysterious person

that seemed to be like his assistant

that spent time with him for many years.

He worked under the pseudonym Rikard, and he's wearing disguises.

He's wearing a wig. But at the same time, it doesn't look like hair.

It looks like a bad perm.

(CHUCKLES)

This is just incredibly weird,

and I had no idea who he was.

In 1987, the security police had asked for him to be followed.

The police wanted permission to eavesdrop their phones.

The reason they gave was that Alf Enerstrom

could be suspected of instigating or inciting the murder.

I knew I had to track him down.

I could see in the police files that in 1987,

only one year after the murder, the secret police

had organised surveillance of Rikard,

this wig-wearing mysterious person that was close to Alf Enerstrom

for more than a decade.

Here's all his interviews with the police.

They started following him in November 1986,

and in the files was the name of the security agent

that was following him.

In the 1980s, I was asked by the Swedish security police

to keep tabs on a very, very strange person

that we called "The Wig Man".

He was called "The Wig Man"

because he was very often using a huge wig

because he wanted to disguise himself. (LAUGHS)

My boss at the security police

was interested in the wig man because they didn't know who he was

and what his purposes was.

There were thoughts that he might have been involved

in the murder of Olof Palme in one way or another.

One year after the murder, Rikard was taken in for interrogation,

and the police asked him, "What did you do on the night of the murder?"

And he didn't remember.

Everybody remembers what he did in the night of the murder in Sweden.

And this secret assistant to Alf Enerstrom,

Sweden's largest Palme hater,

had no idea if he was working or not working.

And I'd been given his real name, David Fredin.

So with Enerstrom dead,

maybe this was the person who could tell me more.

I've tried to write to David to see if he would talk to me.

I've called him. He doesn't want to talk.

So I need to take it to another level.

I start looking at social networks,

and on Facebook I find a few called David Fredin.

But there's only one in Sweden.

Most of their friends are middle-aged men,

and there are several well-known right wingers in Sweden.

Now I know I've got the right guy.

And I'm thinking, how do I get closer to David Fredin?

But there is another person that stands out.

It's a beautiful girl.

Maybe a little bit too beautiful to be a real profile picture.

She's got a Czech name, and she's called Lida Komarkova.

So I wasn't sure, but I thought it was a fake profile.

But I think is there any other way to get to David?

Let's at least try it. I decided to send a brief message.

And there was no response. Not a day later, not a week later.

Only some months later.

(CHIMES)

I'm thinking, is this a fake profile?

I'm thinking, is this a trap?

But in any case, it's worth the risk.

I was sending one message and then she answered,

it could take it a day or even a week.

(CHIMES)

It seems like that person is fishing for information

about me just as much as I am fishing.

It started to feel like a cat and mouse game and I realised

I needed to get a reaction from this person to see if he or she was real.

There was a pause for a few days.

And then... (CHIMES)

I'd already been to Northern Cyprus. I'd tracked down Alf Enerstrom.

So I was thinking, what can I lose?

So I just took a chance.

She mentioned the name of a bar. (CHIMES)

A time. (CHIMES)

And it said... (CHIMES)

I had started to become a little bit addicted

to the rush of doing these out of the ordinary things.

So just to go to Prague to meet a possible news source,

that seemed pretty normal, suddenly.

The Palme virus is dangerous.

You will do things you would never expect.

So I arrive in Prague and I go to this bar.

I sit down by the counter and I order two Moscow mules,

and then I'm waiting.

I was there more than an hour.

The bar is pretty full with people

and I'm thinking she's not coming

or he or whoever.

There's this woman that I've seen circling around in the bar,

but it's not the picture from the Facebook profile.

She suddenly sits down on the empty seat next to me

and starts drinking from the Moscow mule.

And I'm saying, "Hey, stop. That's not for you."

And she's saying, "Yes, it is."

I ask a couple of questions.

And then

I realised that's her.

That's Lida Komarkova.

I got to the bar some time earlier because I wanted

to check on him, what he's doing, how he's behaving.

He looks kind of safe. No danger. So I go over to him.

I'm a little bit suspicious

of what her purposes are and what she's hiding.

At that stage, I'm living in Prague.

I live a normal life, normal friends,

with a normal job from ten till five.

And it's so boring.

I just needed excitement and I just needed a kick in my life.

And it felt like an adventure.

It felt like fun to meet the guy from Sweden in a bar.

Why not? (CHUCKLES)

It's a crazy story that just keeps getting crazier.

Sometimes I just create fake profiles.

It's fun. You can choose how you look like, your hair.

I had about, I don't know, five fake profiles,

and one of them was Lida.

I've been joining lots of groups

about things that I was interested in.

And sometimes I would add people from the groups as a friend.

And one of them was David.

Jan starts to tell me about he's interested in Olof Palme's murder.

I'm telling her why I'm looking into David Fredin.

For that David might have some information.

And she sort of lights up.

I can see that she thinks this is quite exciting,

and I'm thinking maybe she can help me,

even if she doesn't know him that well.

I wasn't close to trusting her, but at the same time,

this is my only chance to get closer to David Fredin.

If you don't risk anything, you don't get anything.

I told him, I see what I can do.

I'll get back to you.

(PHONE LINE RINGS)

Hey, Goran, how's it going?

How would it work?

I spoke to the general in the military intelligence

and asked him, what do you think?

Would it be possible to promote the kind of negotiation

where Sweden, or the prosecutor, gives you immunity

against prosecution, and the guys who did it,

they come forward - and tell the story. - Wow.

(VIBRATES)

I was called by a man active in intelligence.

Let's call him Frank.

He will arrange a meeting for me with somebody very important.

He said you come to the Hyatt Hotel at 1:30.

We sat at the table.

Frank tells me that we are going to see this very high-ranking general

in the military intelligence in South Africa,

somebody who is active today.

And then a man comes over to our table and he sat down.

He tells me that he knows all about my idea for Sweden to give immunity

against prosecution if the guys who did it come forward.

He had three meetings with the Army leadership

in South Africa in order to prepare for this meeting,

and they had given him the mandate to talk to me.

I realised then that there is a misunderstanding.

They all seem to assume that I was on official business,

that I was representing the Swedish government,

which I wasn't. This is just a hobby.

(CHUCKLES)

I'm thinking that I may get very, very important information here.

So I turn on the recorder on my mobile phone...

And he said, this is dangerous and I should be careful.

So he said that South Africa is willing to help

Sweden solve the case. But there were two conditions.

One condition was that no South African could

ever be prosecuted because they were under orders of their government.

The general explains to me that I should take this information

to the intelligence in Sweden

and that the two intelligence services in South Africa and Sweden,

they were going to prepare the solution -

or how it should be presented.

Wow. Yeah, that was a pretty clear message for me.

This confirms what you and I have been thinking for many years.

There was actually South African involvement in the murder.

It sounded close to an admission.

The South Africans would consider some kind of deal

to close the case forever.

But Stieg's theory was they hadn't acted alone.

The South Africans were using the middleman,

Bertil Wedin, to connect them to the Swedish right wingers.

I tried to get to the mystery assistant, David Fredin,

who had worked for a decade with Alf Enerstrom

and operated under a pseudonym. Rikard.

But it had seemingly come to nothing.

And then, a few months later,

on the doorstep, I found an envelope and it was stamped in Prague.

I opened it and there was a USB stick inside.

I was taking a risk when I put it straight into my computer,

but I was curious. When I open it up,

I see it's something I would never have expected.

I assumed that the USB stick came from Lida Komarkova in Prague,

but I couldn't know. When I open it up,

there were two folders. One called Facebook. One called Emails.

And I opened one of them.

And there's a dialogue between Lida Komarkova and David Fredin,

this wig-wearing mysterious assistant

that was close to Alf Enerstrom for more than a decade.

It's unbelievable.

Lida has managed to lead David Fredin to tell things that he had probably

never told anybody through three decades.

How did she do this?

And I found a couple of messages where he's actually speaking about

his hatred against all of parliament, even one when he's celebrating

the anniversary of the murder, drinking a glass of wine

to celebrate the death of the traitor

and how he has planned to murder Olof Palme

when he was 12, 13 years old,

thinking that he could get away with it since he was so young.

It's like being a fly on the wall on the Palme hater at the time.

These right-wing fanatics thought that Palme was a traitor,

that he was actually travelling to Moscow.

Sweden would become another region of the Soviet Union.

So David is quite open telling them about Dr Enerstrom,

who he admires, who he had been working for, for several years,

and then suddenly he's talking about another person

that he admires a lot, about the mysterious friend.

And it takes quite a long time. But then in the end, he says who it is.

It's Bertil Wedin, the middleman in Cyprus.

Bertil Wedin, a man who had connections to one of South Africa's

most famous operatives and killers, Craig Williamson.

And he also tells me that Alf Enerstrom knew Bertil Wedin.

Immediately, as I read this, I got goosebumps.

Enerstrom knows the middleman, Bertil Wedin,

who is working for the South African Security Service

with Craig Williamson at the top.

This is really big. Nobody had ever made that connection.

Stieg Larsson didn't make the connection.

The Swedish police didn't make the connection.

This was the first time.

So suddenly there is a connection between all of the cells

that were needed to actually carry out this killing.

There's still one other folder.

And I click on it and there are at least 5,000 emails...

between David Fredin and Bertil Wedin.

It's unbelievable.

And I'm thinking, who the hell is this woman

and how did she get these?

I have friends that can do interesting things.

I decided that it's ethically OK.

It's of high public interest.

And I start reading and I stay there for several hours.

Just reading and reading.

They are paranoid. They mention all the time

how they think they're hacked. How they're being bugged.

They're describing people that are following them.

Bertil is giving advice how David should act.

And in one email, David asks for advice on a woman on Facebook

who has approached him,

and he describes how interested she's been

in the Palme assassination.

Bertil Wedin replies and tells David not to mention his name

in such serious matters.

But for the first time I saw my own name in an email from David

to Bertil Wedin, the hair on the back of my neck rose.

Cos I realised they're on to me as I'm on to them.

I try once more to get in touch with David.

I write to him, I call him, but he refuses to speak to me.

Why do you refuse to talk with Jan Stocklassa?

He doesn't like what I was doing. It doesn't like that

I'm anti-communist.

He read thousands of my emails and yet I'm not surprised.

You know, this is a business like any business.

The Cold War never ended.

Interview with the man formerly known as Rikard.

My name is David Fredin.

And because of the political situation,

I used an alias, Rikard.

I used a wig to be more difficult to identify me

by hostile elements like the KGB.

My father told me that

there was an arrest of a Soviet spy in my country.

It was a colonel in the Air Force.

And so I knew, you know, from a young age, what a spy was.

So when I saw Mr Palme, who was then the prime minister of Sweden,

walking alongside the North Vietnamese ambassador to Moscow,

I suspected, at that age,

that Palme was also somebody that spied.

In 1985,

I made my way into Stockholm,

and this was the first time I met Dr Enerstrom.

He dedicated his life to be a real opposition for us to Palme.

There was nobody else out there who wanted to do the job.

They called it Palme hatred.

I eventually became Dr Enerstrom's assistant.

Dr Enerstrom's goal

was that Palme should not win elections.

They had a lot of names of people who donated in money,

sometimes from the United States.

So I was in charge of the briefcase with the names

and addresses and telephone numbers.

Sometimes they dropped money at a public toilet,

but where you draw down the paper towels.

I was told that the day before he was killed,

Palme met with the Soviet intelligence

to hand over the case of the kingdom to the KGB.

He's one of the worst traitors in Swedish history.

I can't find anybody that does Sweden so much harm.

So I'm convinced that David Fredin knows much more than he's telling us.

Alf Enerstrom, he had told me that he had been on Sveavagen that night,

he had told me that he had been asked to fund the murder,

and he had told me that he knew who was involved -

and it included members of the police.

I know that there was someone that came to Dr Enerstrom.

I think he worked for the Swedish police, some branch of it,

and brought up the question of an assassination,

of removing Palme.

But Dr Enerstrom told me afterwards that he turned them down.

Come on. This is Sweden's biggest Palme hater who no longer

has an alibi for the murder.

Neither of them have an alibi for the night.

Most people don't have alibis for a night.

And if you have an alibi, you should start to wonder, you know?

You know, it's a bit suspicious.

Something is telling me I'm getting closer and closer to the truth.

Be careful who you believe and who you trust.

Most of Jan Stocklassa's information comes from Stieg Larsson.

And we shouldn't trust Stieg Larsson and the communists.

If somebody asks me about who is behind Lida Komarkova,

I would say she is working for the Russian Secret Service, FSB,

previous KGB. That would be a logical conclusion.

Jan Stocklassa's behaviour is the same.

He's doing beneficial works for the Russian intelligence.

He's doing everything like a KGB agent.

He might not be a KGB agent, but he's doing the same stuff.

And I think somebody needs to tell him to shut up.

Everything I've seen and heard makes me

more convinced than ever that Stieg Larsson's theory stands up.

At the height of the Cold War,

the hatred against Palme was being whipped into a frenzy.

Fanatics on the right were willing and ready to kill Olof Palme.

But that was just part of the story.

So here's how I think it happened.

Olof Palme had many enemies on the world stage,

but there were two groups in particular who came

together in February 1986.

(GUNSHOT)

South Africa had named him an enemy of the state

because of his political activities.

This was a regime desperately clinging to power.

Olof Palme was the driving force, the general,

the commandant of the international movement against apartheid.

In Sweden, the right wingers wanted

to get rid of him because they thought he was a traitor.

These two separate groups, they had double motives but with a shared aim.

The operation to kill Olof Palme had been planned by South Africa.

There was a planning group operated with someone like

possibly Craig Williamson.

Hunt them down, catch them and shoot them.

One of the foulest individuals that has walked this Earth.

Someone who knew Sweden, who had contacts there.

Williamson shouldn't have been there in Sweden.

By this time, he's known as The Spy.

But even South Africa's best operatives needed

contacts and assistance on the ground.

So they turned to someone who they had worked extensively with before.

The middleman who had a foot in both countries.

Bertil Wedin.

I had proved that Bertil Wedin had contacts

with fanatics inside Sweden that despised Palme.

Individuals in many of the groups Stieg had been investigating.

But I believe an incredibly important contact was

Sweden's biggest Palme hater.

He was a man who had money, influential backers,

and access to plenty of fanatics who believed

Palme was about to turn Sweden into another Soviet state.

And like he said, I think one or two extremists

he knew within the police had helped carry out the operation.

They have walkie-talkies,

they're communicating, they're being seen by several witnesses.

And it all combined into an organised setup

to kill our Prime Minister.

I may not be able to show who pulled the trigger,

but to me this is almost irrelevant because I think we found

who was ultimately behind the assassination,

their motives and how it happened.

After my ten years of investigation,

I decided to compile my material and hand everything in to the police.

And then the prosecutor steps out and says, "We have solved the murder."

And I'm saying, "Wow."

I had put in so much work for so many years,

my life had been turned upside down.

I'd put myself to danger but now everything was going to be worth it.

I have helped them to crack the case,

solve this unsolvable riddle.

So it's been building up for a few months.

We're coming close to the day when they will announce

who murdered our Prime Minister.

And the whole of Sweden is standing still.

Everybody's waiting for what the police will say.

Finally, after 34 years, the Swedes were going to have the truth

about who killed Olof Palme and why.

And then the press conference starts.

I'm nervous. I'm excited.

They start mentioning everything I have investigated,

the adrenaline, it's just pumping.

And it's like a detective story has become real life.

Finally the case will be solved.

And we have been part of that.

When I'm looking at this press conference, I'm beginning to notice

their body language and they don't look confident at all.

But I'm starting to sense that there's something that is not right.

And then they come with the big revelation.

Stieg Engstrom is a witness who contacted the police

several times to ask to be interviewed.

He is a graphic designer at the insurance company Skandia

that is situated very close to the crossing

where Palme was assassinated.

I'm fucking angry. It's outrageous.

There is no murder weapon, there are no forensics,

and there is no motive at all.

No way. No fucking way.

They've spent all this time, all this money,

and all we got was a fucking ugly PowerPoint presentation.

I know they're wrong, they know they're wrong,

but they're still saying it. It's...

The suspect is dead so we can't pursue the investigation anymore.

Full stop.

They're saying that it's not South Africa.

It's not a conspiracy. It's this graphic designer working overtime

who we know clocks out just one to two minutes before the murder.

Where did he get the gun from?

How come he stepped out of the door just at the right moment?

And what motive did he have?

He's not the one that I saw.

It wasn't "The Skandia Man" who killed our Prime Minister.

It was the prosecutors who killed the investigation

by using "The Skandia Man".

We are definitely being lied to and this is extremely disturbing

and there is something rotten at the centre of it.

If it looks like a cover-up, if it smells as a cover-up,

it is a cover-up.

After the press conference, I felt completely empty

and disappointed.1⁄2 Me too.

And I called my intelligence contact in South Africa.

They wanted him to tell me a little bit about what

had been said in South Africa, and I actually record the conversation.

"Ah-ha."

"OK."

"OK." It's outrageous.

So there was a deal.

Exactly. There is finally a deal.

But a deal to put the lid on, - it seems. - Yeah.

There must be something really, really sensitive

that cannot see the light of the day.

And we don't know exactly what that is.

Many years of work.

And they blew it.

With the right people in the right way,

they would solve it in a few months' time.

And I believe it will be the solution that Stieg Larsson laid out

30 years ago.

The Swedish people deserve better.

I think that Stieg Larsson deserves better.

And I definitely think Olof Palme and his family deserve better.

What would you like the first line of your obituary to say?

The moment people begin to think of their obituaries,

they start to be scared.

They don't dare to do things and they lose their vitality.

What's the legacy of my father?

I remember him as being very brave to confront

society's injustices wherever he saw them.

What is... apartheid?

It is a continued development

of the privileged racist minority.

He said that you should see yourself in action.

You can't only be, you have to act to be.

Olof Palme was an inspiration to millions way beyond the borders

of his own country. And in that sense,

he is still a loss.

We say we should forgive and forget.

I'll never forgive them for killing Olof Palme.

I'll never forget it.

I don't think it's too late to solve this crime.

Even if the police and the prosecutor have given up,

the rest of us haven't.

There are thousands upon thousands of us

all around the world who had the Palme virus.

It infected Stieg Larsson.

It infected me.

And just like a real virus, once you catch it,

pass it on to those you get close to.

AccessibleCustomerService@sky.uk