25 år efter Lockerbie – svenska spåret fortfarande inte utrett

Den 21 december 1988 klockan halv sju på kvällen, lyfte PAN AMs flight 103 från London Heathrow med destination New York. Planet flög på marschhöjden 10 000 meter över Lockerbie i Skottland.

Då small det klockan 19.03 och ett halvt kilo Semtex placerat i en resväska i babords främre lastutrymme sprängde ett flera kvadratmeter stort hål. 175 000 liter flygbränsle exploderade och förvandlade flight 103 till småbitar. Snart regnade 259 sönderslitna människokroppar, bagage, julklappar och vrakdelar över staden och ett område på flera kvadratkilometer. Cockpiten var någorlunda intakt och landade på ett fält.

På marken dödades 11 människor då hus bröts sönder. En krater slogs upp som slungade 1 500 ton jord och byggbråte vida omkring. Bland de dödade ombord fanns två svenskar, diplomaten Bernt Carlsson och flygvärdinnan Siv Engström.

Det var det då värsta terroristattentatet i historien. Utredarna pusslade ihop vrakdelarna i en tillfällig hangar och snart fann man resterna efter bomben. Den hade placerats i en Toshibaradio, styrd av en timer och inlindad i kläder. Alltsammans placerat i en brun resväska av märket Samsonite.

Skotsk polis pekade snart ut den palestinska terroristorganisationen PFLP-GC, med bas i Syrien. Attacken mot PAN AM skulle ha varit en hämnd från Iran efter att det amerikanska krigsfartyget USS Vincennes i juli samma år av misstag skjutit ner en iransk Airbus med 290 pilgrimer ombord på väg till Mecka. Ayatollah Khomeini sa efter nedskjutningen att ”hela skyn ska regna blod”.

Två månader före Lockerbieattentatet hade västtysk polis gjort ett tillslag mot en terroristcell utanför Düsseldorf, där man grep 17 medlemmar av just PFLP-GC. En av de gripna var en palestinier som bodde i Uppsala. Det viktigaste var att polisen hittade fyra Semtexbomber monterade i radioapparater av märket Toshiba. Svensk säkerhetspolis fick tips om att det kunde finnas en cell också i Uppsala, men brydde sig egentligen inte alls om tipset.

En femte bomb i Düsseldorf var dock försvunnen och hade gömts undan av terroristcellens bombmakare, Marwan Kreeshat. Amerikanska ABC News Europakorrespondent, Pierre Salinger, intervjuade senare Kreeshat i fängelset. Han sa då att han var övertygad om att det var just hans bomb som hade sprängt PAN AM-flighten. Man vet också att under hösten 1988 överfördes stora summor pengar i omgångar från Iran till den tyska terroristcellen via olika banker i Mellanöstern.

Men i augusti 1990 blev det palestinsk-iranska spåret iskallt, då Irak hade invaderat Kuwait. Invasionen och det första Gulfkriget förändrade, på amerikanskt initiativ, utredningen totalt. Inför uppmarschen till kriget gällde det att hålla både Syrien och Iran på mattan.

Spåret efter PFLP-GC blev ointressant och istället pekade USA ut Libyen som ansvarigt för dådet och FN införde på beställning omfattande sanktioner mot Libyen. Efter långa förhandlingar gick Moammar Khadaffi med på att lämna ut två libyer till en skotsk specialdomstol som upprättades på en nerlagd militärbas i Holland.

Efter två skenrättegångar dömdes den ene libyern, Abdelbaset al Megrahi till 27 års fängelse, medan den andre friades. Khadaffi betalade 2,7 miljarder dollar till offrens anhöriga. Sanktionerna avbröts och Storbritannien fick i utbyte lukrativa oljekontrakt. Al Megrahi skickades hem till Libyen 2009, där han senare avled i cancer.

Domen mot al Megrahi byggde på ett utpekande av en affärsinnehavare på Malta, Tony Gauci, som bevisligen hade sålt de kläder som återfanns i bombväskan. Men utpekandet var lögnaktigt, då han i förväg fått se en bild av al Megrahi. Han fick dessutom två miljoner dollar av USA för sitt vittnesmål.

Vid rättegången i Holland förhördes också en numera 59 år gammal palestinier från Uppsala. Men han förnekade ihärdigt all inblandning och hans påstådda alibi har aldrig kunnat verifieras av svensk polis. 59-åringen satt vid den tiden av ett livstidsstraff i Sverige tillsammans med en lika gammal palestinsk kumpan, för en serie bombdåd i Köpenhamn och i Amsterdam som spred död och förintelse och som genomfördes 1985.

De greps först i maj 1989, ett halvår efter Lockerbie, tillsammans med två andra palestinier som numera lämnat Sverige, den ene utvisad enligt terroristlagen. Den 59-årige huvudmannen i terrorligan i Uppsala har av en åklagare i det svenska terrormålet kallats för ”en livsfarlig fotsoldat”. Han hade bland annat varit chef för livvaktsstyrkor inom PFLP-GC i både Libanon och Syrien och var militärt välutbildad i Sovjetunionen.

Idag är det många skotska utredare och experter som anser att det var den 59-årige huvudmannen från Uppsala som såg till att den försvunna femte bomben i Düsseldorf lastades ombord redan i Frankfurt, där PAN AM 103 inledde flighten. Det är bevisat att bombväskan lastades utan att den tillhörde någon passagerare.

Uppsalaligan hade dessutom rest åtskilliga gånger till både Frankfurt och München. Alla gånger på olika falska pass. Det är också bevisat att 59-åringen befann sig på Malta under hösten 1988 och hans jämnårige kumpan hade dessutom bott på Malta.

I huvudmannens bostad i Uppsala fann polisen en kalender med datumet 21 december inringat och i ett avlyssnat telefonsamtal sa hans hustru till en annan person ”gör dig av med kläderna omedelbart”. Hos den personen hittades en väska av samma typ som bombväskan.

Men det svenska spåret efter sprängningen över Lockerbie har aldrig borrats i botten och det är den stora svenska skandalen i sammanhanget, trots att de skotska utredarna numera är övertygade om att det verkligen var PFLP-GC som låg bakom attentatet över Lockerbie.

Huvudmannen från Uppsalaligan och hans närmaste man är numera fria och är tillbaka i Uppsala, så ingen kan påstå att det svenska spåret inte längre går att utreda. Dessutom finns mycket omfattande beslag fortfarande kvar hos svensk polis.

Fotnot: Den 21 december hålls en stor minneshögtid i Londonkatedralen Westminster Abbey och liknande högtider i kyrkor över hela USA, för att hedra de 270 offren.

The Catrine da Costa case – media court and the enemies of justice

Posted by Dispatch International April 11, 2013. Fifth and last article in a series.

Despite all setbacks, the two doctors did not give up their battle for justice and restitution. They appealed the revocation of their medical licenses to Regeringsrätten (The Supreme Administrative Court) – who rejected their filing. Then came an extended period involving a series of applications for restitution, and a couple of filings at the European Commission of Human Rights. All were rejected, as if an assembly line were stamping blank papers with rubber stamps.

This legal intermission went on for a full twelve years, until Anders Agell, a professor emeritus in civil law, took up the case in 2003. Yet another application for restitution was denied,.

Submissions to Chancellor of Justice Göran Lambertz produced no results, and the Chancellor likewise refused to agree to a multi-million kroner demand for damages. Lambertz thought that would be for a court to decide.

So, after having worked on the case for four years, on April 2007 Anders Agell filed a case against the Swedish state, at the district court of Attunda, demanding a total of Skr 40 million (€4.8 million) in damages, loss of income and negligence on the part of the state.

The first step in that case, which was to become number 16 in the sequence after 1988, was a so-called interlocutory, where judge Nils Hedström declined to accept the claim from the State that events predating 1991 were past the statute of limitations. Then the Director of Attunda district court, Erik Ternert, claimed Hedström was in a conflict of interest, to the advantage of the doctors.

Nils Hedström was withdrawn from the case, and Ternert himself took over. But at the same time the undersigned revealed in a series of articles that Erik Ternert had dealt secretly with the state agent, who at that time was an assistant of the Chancellor of Justice. In a narrow circle, judge Ternert had also promised that the case would never actually be taken up at court. My revelations led to Judge Ternert’s being forced to resign from his office.

Erik Ternert had also attempted to compel the obviously talented Anders Agell to leave the case, referring to his age. Professor Agell, 77 at the time, became extremely angry over the excesses by Ternert.

However, when the case for damages eventually came before the Attunda district court in November 2009, Anders Agell had died, having been replaced by the lawyers Kajsa Blomgren and Carl Johan Vahlén representing the doctors. 157 points were presented wherein the State was considered to have acted incorrectly, illegally or with negligence.

The Swedish State was represented through the Chancellor of Justice by the retired judge Ingvar Gunnarsson, who back in the days was a close friend and colleague of Carl Anton Spak, the man who had penned the devastating justification for the verdict back in 1988.

The spokesman for the court was judge Sten Falkner, a former prosecutor who had previously worked on laws at the Ministry for Justice and had also worked for the National Prosecutor. That made him a clear example of the very unfortunate practice in which top-level lawyers move between various positions within the legal system. The risk of corruption through friendship is too large.

It would soon turn out that the scandals from the previous legal circus were to see new chapters, in the damages case as well the debacle concerning Erik Ternert’s blunders. For the State had neglected to file its objections to the 157 points justifying damages, and was now forced into simply giving up on all objections.

That made a flabbergasted Sten Falkner ask the lawyers what they wanted ”to be written in a future verdict”. That was no simple oversight from the side of the State, it was pure carelessness, the State’s attorneys demanding many breaks for deliberations. To the audience it was like following a game of chess with the Devil, who was eventually forced to sacrifice his queen.

”We have been nagging them like crazy for 18 months to file the objections, but they have not bothered to do so,” attorney Kajsa Blomgren said during one of the breaks.

Apart from the legal chess games, the proceedings brought forth only a little real news. The first came when the professor in forensic medicine, Jovan Rajs, gave his testimony. He was the absolute crowning witness in the damages case, due to his position as the Härm’s superior at the medical investigation clinic at Solna. Already at an early stage, he had turned his adept Teet Härm into the police, via a handwritten letter to the technical police division.

Now, 25 years later, Rajs claimed that the only thing he knew with certainty was that da Costa had been murdered. ”But who had murdered her I can’t tell,” he said. Rajs was the person who had autopsied the body parts, and his unwavering testimony in the previous cases, primarily against Teet Härm, had been very decisive.

Jovan Rajs also got into a heated courtroom quarrel with Kajsa Blomgren, as she started reading out his memoirs, in which he describes Teet Härm as ”a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”.

Rajs then shouted aggressively to the entire room: ”No quoting, if you read, you must read the complete chapter. This is not Moscow in 1936.” With his verbal outbursts, Rajs attempted to equate the case with the Stalinist purges in the former Soviet Union. If Rajs had previously been a respected professor in forensic medicine, and previously had pawned his credibility on Härm’s status as both a killer and a dismemberer, he managed on that day to squander all his respect.

It was a clearly shaken person who left the court abruptly after his testimony, accompanied by extreme feminists, who yet again had turned up.

One of the jurors from the 1988 murder case also gave testimony. John-Henri Holmberg explained that he had no idea what the content of the devastating verdict justification would be. Also, he had no knowledge of how that justification was to be written, and got to see the complete verdict only on the same day it was published.

Two judges were also forced to the witness stand: Ingegerd Westlander, who penned the justification about dismembering along with Carl Anton Spak, and Peter Wennerholm, who penned the verdict from the Administrative Court about revoking the doctor’s licenses. But both of them crawled insecurely back and forth among their claimed memory gaps, or referred to the judge’s oath, which prevents judges from revealing details from the individual court deliberations. And the spokesman for the court, Sten Falkner, let them keep up their charades with a smile.

At this point, the media circus had taken down its tent and packed up, coverage of the case was very limited, and no so-called “cultural personalities” appeared during the hearings. Possibly they were ashamed of their previous excesses in reporting.

In the verdict from Attunda District Court, which was handed down in February 2010, 26 of the 157 points from the doctors’ side were upheld, but the district court did not consider any of those points serious enough to justify damages. The verdict was appealed to the High Court as well as to the Supreme Court, but without any result.

In total, some 30 judges have been involved in the 18 different cases through three decades. And we can easily note that in many cases, judges have protected each other from criticism for previous mistakes.

The Catrine da Costa case has been characterized by pure cowardice, miserable legal incompetence and corruption. But the word “corruption” does not exist in Swedish law book. And yet, all of these combined have been the sparks that ignited the fire of legal decay and burned justice to ashes.

By Anders Carlgren

The Catrine da Costa case – Legal incompetence and corruption

 

Posted by: Dispatch International April 4, 2013. Fourth article in a series.

After the two show trials in the district court of Stockholm against the two doctors charged with the murder of Catrine da Costa, the National Health Board revoked their licenses to practice medicine. This was done referring to the acquittal from the court stating that they had dismembered the dead body. Thus, they were both acquitted and punished under the same verdict. The National Health Board decision was appealed several times, and the battle for justice and restitution continues even today.

The decisive trial about the licenses of Thomas Allgén and Teet Härm began on a spring day in April 1991 at the Administrative Court in Stockholm. Almost two years have passed since the devastating verdict from the district court. The doctors were acquitted, but were thought to have dismembered the body, their punishment being barred due to the statute of limitations.

The justification was appealed, but the high court as well as the supreme court refused to nullify it. The case was then taken to the Administrative Court in order to cancel the National Health Board decision. The legal wrangling  started with annulling the decision, giving the doctors their licenses back.

But then the Supreme Administrative Court stepped in, demanding that the Administrative Court should retry the case, now demanding that the case had to be decided with presentation of evidence as in a criminal case, despite the Administrative Court having no such legal competence.

The Social Democrat Laila Freivalds was Minister of Justice at the time, and it was legally and politically impossible to take this without her approval. The procedure has even been called “the politicized miscarriage of justice”.

At the retrial on the spring day in 1991, hordes of hard-line feminists had assembled in the street outside, with banners stating “Class before gender”, “Who will be the next victim?” and “Women get no justice”. From the shouting came the slogan ”Hear our call, grave respect for all!”.

The over-inflated media expectations stimulated the general public as well as demonstrators. The news anchor Olle Andersson at state broadcaster SVT was practically alone in his early observation of his colleagues’ attitude:

”What really astonished me was the hateful mood among reporters from Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Aftonbladet and from the opinion writers of those newspapers. The doctors were to be hung up by their genitals, they were guilty! During the breaks at the trials, there was hatred emanating from the walls from those reporters.”

The crime journalist Ewa Thures from the news agency TT described Thomas Allgén as a ”schoolboy looking like an old man”. And Gun Fälth of Dagens Nyheter, who worked as a prosecutor in the past, considered it tiresome to listen to Allgén, that he was ”arrogant and jealous over his dignity”. Britt Edwall, a hardcore feminist at the state broadcaster Sveriges Radio, thought that Teet Härm was ”brooding, gray and closed” beside his lawyer, whom Edwall thought was ”as if taken directly from a theater piece by Molière”.

As the two doctors fought at court for their professional honor and future, all media impartiality and objectivity was gone with the wind.

The Administrative Court had one issue to decide: whether Allgén and Härm were still worthy to work as doctors. Bertil Södermark, the National Health Board spokesman in the case, demanded in his submissions that the standards of proof had to be set lower than in the district court, as there was no fundamental right to work as doctors. An ID issue was not the same thing as being charged with murder, Södermark held.

This trial featured the reappearance of roughly the same set of witnesses as at the district court, as well as various psychiatrists and psychologists as expert witnesses, fighting each other over the credibility of the testimony from the child Karin about what she was claimed to have experienced.

Journalists of culture such as Yrsa Stenius at Aftonbladet and Eva Ekselius at Dagens Nyheter wrote about the conflict as if they were themselves experts in the matter. The shifting role identities among the journalists were obvious. Furthest down that road was the star writer Per Svensson of Expressen as he tried to analyze what went on in the head of Teet Härm:

”The Coroner is a mere two years older than myself. There are several boys of his kind in my schoolyards, boys who were not permitted to play along, and who would rather stay at home, do homework, study books about the style of SS uniforms, gluing together plastic models of German tanks.” Svensson continued: ”Boys of this kind used to like experimenting with pulling the legs off flies. And the lord of the flies in a doctor’s coat is a nightmare figure you would prefer avoiding any contact with.”

Yrsa Stenius of Aftonbladet wrote seven chronicles, one from each day at court. She saw Thomas Allgén before her ”as a man who is strict and controlled, bordering on lifeless. [...] The man behaves a bit like a robot. Yet, from time to time, something does trickle through the iron curtain.”

The hard-line feminist struggle to punish the two doctors was beginning to look like a public movement, and soon the campaign was given a name: “Justice for Catrine”. There were daily demonstrations, and when the verdict came on May 31st, the conclusion was given in advance.

Thomas Allgén and Teet Härm did not get their doctor’s licenses back. The miscarriage of justice had now been confirmed by a court lacking the legal competence to evaluate the case.

On that evening, 600 feminists marched through the streets of Stockholm, red roses in their hands. At the staircase leading to the High Court of Svea, the hard-line feminist Hanna Olsson, who succeeded in making the prosecutor Anders Helin take the case to the district court a second time, spoke:

Olsson was hoping that the word “whore” could now be eliminated. “After this, only the word ‘woman’ exists. We are breaking a millennium-old patriarchal order under the man,” Olsson was shouting to the jubilant women laying down their roses on the stairs to the court.

In the last chapter: The doctors fight their last battle – demanding Skr 40 million (€4.8 million) compensation for damages.

The Catrine da Costa case – media court and the enemies of justice

 

Publisched by Dispatch International March 28, 2013. Third in a series.

In the previous installment we described how completely impossible it was that the two doctors could have managed to pick up da Costa, bring her to the medical investigation clinic, have sex with her, kill her, dismember the body, clean up the autopsy room, bring away the body parts and get back home.

In order to disguise this fact and prevent the doctors from being acquitted, the way the first trial collapsed due to procedural errors and blabbering jurors, the ultrafeminist Hanna Olsson launched a campaign aimed at demolishing the doctors based on emotional arguments.

On the same day that the renewed decision to prosecute came, March 31^st, the leftist lawyer Christian Diesen wrote in the communist newspaper Proletären that he was convinced that the doctors were guilty, and that it was frustrating that with their perversions they ”will get away with it because the head of the victim was never found.”

Hanna Olsson and Cristian Diesen were now seen as the standard-bearers of truth, not least among the leftist journalists at the state broadcasters Sveriges Radio and Sveriges Television. They had been convinced by the political and feminist rhetoric surrounding the case about the two high society men and the defiled woman.

The retrial against Thomas Allgén and Teet Härm went much more according to the tastes of Hanna Olsson and Christian Diesen than the first. The prostitute with the diary eventually played a key role, providing support for what the child Karin had said.

Much later, the professor and author Leif GW Persson judged the diary a forgery, and the author Jan Guillou believes that the woman committed perjury in giving her testimony.

During the second trial at the end of May 1988, the witness with the diary made a powerful impression, not least because she previously, in an interview given to Sveriges Television, had explained how a tied-up da Costa had been subjected to throttling sex games in the presence of the small child. But to the police she had given an entirely different story. The possibly forged diary was proclaimed a document of truth by the media.

Public prosecutor Helin’s tactic was to prove both doctors to be perverted with an abnormal sexual interest in defiling weak women. In this way, he was entirely in line with the two self-proclaimed experts Hanna Olsson and Christian Diesen.

Witnesses from the first trial now appeared in court again. The court chose to screen two gory movies which had been confiscated from Teet Härm. That decision was taken after Folkaktionen mot Pornografi, (“The People’s Campaign Against Pornography”), backed by some 70 more or less militant feminist women’s organizations, had written an open letter to the prosecutor, demanding that the movies be shown.

Screening the movies made a great impact in the media, in Sweden as well as abroad, and leftist journalism with its tainted feminist reporting reinforced the image of both doctors as being sexual monsters.

But the judgment at the court of Stockholm on July 8^th 1988 became a double surprise. Teet Härm and Thomas Allgén were acquitted of murder. The charge of having dismembered the body fell away due to any such crime being past the statute of limitations.

But the judge, Carl-Anton Spak, also wrote in his verdict, which could not be appealed, that it had been made clear that the two had dismembered the dead body. At a press conference, he said “one could view that as consumer information”.

Three years later, after a series of trials, both doctors lost their licenses to practice. The corruption of justice had now dug itself into the bedrock of Swedish law.

In the next installment, we describe the doctors’ battle, lasting more than 20 years, to obtain justice and redress from the scandalous verdicts.

By Anders Carlgren

The feminist media court decided the fates of the coroner and the general practitioner

The da Costa case: Feminist media court deciding fate of two doctors.

Published by Dispatch International March 21, 2013. Second part in a series.

After a scandalously poor police investigation and six months of solitary confinement, it was time for the two doctors Teet Härm and Thomas Allgén to face justice in the District Court of Stockholm. But there was not to be any justice in the Catrine da Costa case, merely two show trials with false witnesses, changing information and a prosecutor who was not even convinced of his own indictment. Dispatch International continues the story of a legal process controlled by an ultra-feminist mob and the media.

When the two doctors were led from the jail to the courtroom on January 22nd 1988, they attempted to conceal their faces from the press photographers and journalists who tried to catch a glimpses of the two monstrous dismembering killers. For that was how they had been described in enormous headlines on the newspaper placards.

They had simply been convicted in advance. The responsibility for that rested heavily on the ultra-feminist mob which for many months had conducted a campaign against the woman-hating monsters, the killers, the rapists and the body dismemberers.

Evening newspapers joined the fray to an unprecedented extent. When the news Director at public broadcaster Sveriges Radio, Erik Fichtelius, decided to publish the names of the two doctors, Everyone else was free to do the same. The decision by Fichtelius gave each of the two men their mark of Cain. It became a first in Swedish legal history that the media along with an external group managed to control a legal process.

The entire first trial became a race between media and the court, where the media won each round. Witnesses appeared in newspapers before they were interrogated in court, or the media speculated extensively in what they would say, to such an extent that it could hardly be missed by members of the court.

Outside the courtroom, the curious and the feminists would line up for hours seeking to get one of the few seats available to the public. The entire process was initiated by the public prosecutor, Anders Helin, who in front of the sitting court was forced to change the date that the murder was supposed to have been committed – because Allgén had an alibi for the original date. So the prosecutor simply pushed the murder date one day ahead in time.

The prosecutorial tactic was to prove that the two had dismembered the body of Catrine da Costas, and that this constituted evidence that they had also committed the murder during barbaric and grotesque sex play at the medical investigators’ center, in the presence of the 18-month-old daughter of Thomas Allgén.

Over the course of two hours, the doctors were supposed to have had time to pick up da Costa, take her to the medical center, have sex with her, murder her, dismember the body, clean up the autopsy room, remove the body bags, and make it back home again. A scenario with impossible timing.

For that reason, the autopsy report of the medical investigator Jovan Rajs became vital for the prosecution. He was also Teet Härm’s boss and four years before the trial had already pointed out his apprentice Teet Härm in a letter to the criminal police. That such claims did not fit to his role as an expert witness was of no concern to the police. Eventually, Rajs said in his testimony that it was not possible to ascertain the cause of death, a severe blow to the whole chain of evidence. His statement was later torn to shreds by the legal council of the Swedish social authorities.

A couple who owned a photography shop testified that Thomas Allgén had submitted a film with images of a dismembered body. But their identification of Allgén was of significantly worse quality than the rejected identification that Lisbet Palme had made of Christer Pettersson.

Christina, Allgén’s ex-wife, testified what their daughter Karin was said to have told her. That ”the lady head ended up in a trashcan” and ”one can cut up ladies like the garden and daddy”, or that ”they grilled eyes and drank blood”. A police officer claimed to have seen Härm and da Costa  in the subway, and one woman erroneously claimed to have seen the two doctors outside the medical investigation clinic on the day in question. All of these witnesses had contacted the investigators only years after the death of da Costa.

Towards the end of the trial, the media changed tack in their extensive speculations. They now believed in an acquittal, after stubbornly having said the opposite earlier. But the verdict was a conviction, published on the international women’s day March 8th, along with a decision for a forensic psychiatric investigation.

Then came the turnaround. The daily Aftonbladet had managed to interview the jurymen while anticipating the final verdict. Their chatter triggered a legal avalanche. The jury members and the judge jumped the gun. The lawyers appealed the decision and continued the case at the high court. Nineteen days later, Thomas Allgén and Teet Härm were set free after a decision at the Svea high court, which also wrote that procedural errors had been committed, and that if the case was taken to the high court, the two were likely to be acquitted.

But there was a political undercurrent around the case, led by a former investigator of prostitution in Sweden, the ultra-feminist Hanna Olsson. She had followed the case closely and written several articles about it. Olsson contacted the prosecutor, which became her starting point for obtaining a retrial.

From out of nowhere suddenly appeared a prostitute with a diary. The woman claimed that da Costa knew the two perverse doctors, and that one of them had a small daughter. The prosecutor Helin decided to take the woman in for an interrogation, while at the same time declaring that he had no intentions of bringing fresh charges.

But he wanted that decision anchored by the National Prosecutor Magnus Sjöberg. On the same day as that meeting took place, on March 29th 1988, the cultural pages of the newspaper Dagens Nyheter published a major article by Hanna Olsson, who with strong moralistic and feminist indignation criticized the prosecutor for not letting prostitutes be witnesses in court. She also claimed that the doctors had sadistic and necrophiliac tendencies. The case had to be taken up again, she wrote.

On the same day, Hanna Olsson also provided Sveriges Radio with a new testimony from a prostitute who claimed that Teet Härm had been a customer of da Costa. Also on the same day, Anders Helin received an express letter from an anonymous woman, claiming that Härm in tears had admitted his guilt to her. The sender of the letter was never found.

A mere two days later, prosecutor Anders Helin decided that there was to be a retrial. It took only a one-day media campaign by Hanna Olsson, and one anonymous letter, for Helin to change his mind and decide for a new prosecution. As of today, it is unknown which role the National Prosecutor played in the spectacle.

In the next installment, we will explain the verdict that acquitted the doctors of murder, but forever marked them as corpse desecrators.

Link to Dispatch International: http://www.d-intl.com/

By Anders Carlgren

Miscarriage of justice: The da Costa case

A thirty year old miscarriage of justice

Published by Dispatch International March 14, 2013. First in a series.

The case of Catrine da Costa must be described as the worst case of corrupted justice in Swedish criminal history. Two young doctors were charged with murdering and dismembering the prostitute in 1984. Four years after her death, the two doctors were acquitted of the murder itself, but were still accused of having dismembered the body. After this a marathon of 18 court cases was brought before various Swedish courts in order to obtain justice. But in each case the doctors have lost, most recently in the Supreme Court last year. This in spite of the fact that everyone aware of the case knows that they are innocent. Nobody knows with certainty how da Costa died. Now, Dispatch International reveals in a series of articles how the law turned into the enemy of justice.

On a warm summer night in the middle of July 1984, a janitor was walking his dog near an exercise park at the Karlberg canal in Solna, a small urban municipality just north of the Stockholm city center. The dog discovered a collection of black plastic bags that were hidden under a shrubbery out of view from the road. The stench of decay was clear from far away, so the man chose to stop a police car he met on the road.

The police officer brought forth the bags and opened up the plastic, but was unable to ascertain if the contents was remains from an animal or a human. The bags were transported to the medical investigation clinic in Solna a couple of miles away, where they turned out to contain the lower parts of a woman’s torso and the upper parts of both thighs. The area was searched in vain for the remaining body parts.

Three weeks later, the police received a tip about an additional two bags some miles away from the first finding place. Those bags contained the upper part of the woman’s torso, her arms and the lower parts of her legs. But the head and the inner organs were never recovered.

The two autopsies of the findings were conducted by the medical investigator Jovan Rajs, who later was to become a key figure as the corruption of justice spread like a prairie fire. At the second autopsy, the junior doctor Teet Härm (30) was also present. His parents had moved from Estonia in 1944 during the Soviet oppression, and Teet was their only child. During the autopsy, Jovan Rajs was in good mood and jokingly said that it must have been a matron who had conducted the dismembering, as the arms had been cut away in such an unusual fashion.

Having found the hands of the dead woman, police files revealed that her name was Catrine da Costa, a prostitute and drug addict aged 28, convicted a few times for minor offenses. The police now pieced together the last days of da Costa’s life by means of her date book. On Pentecost Sunday, June 10th, she had been visiting an architect in Östermalm, Stockholm, where she had injected heroin and afterwards slept for some hours. After that, she and the architect left the house, and he drove her by car to Kungsträdgården, a park in central Stockholm. The clues ended there, although it was later reported that she had been seen after Pentecost as well.

Police now started to walk through the red light districts of Stockholm by night, carrying a photo album. It contained pictures of twelve men, including the architect, a car mechanic whom da Costa used to spend the night with, and several doctors known to be customers of prostitutes.

Some weeks later came what was considered the great breakthrough. A man in his 50s turned up at the police station. His name was Rolf, and he falsely claimed to be working for the military intelligence services. In fact, however, he was the father of the first wife of the medical investigator Teet Härm, who two years before had committed suicide in the couple’s home.

Rolf handed over a long memorandum concluding that the police should take a close look at Teet Härm. That led to the addition of a photo of Härm to the album carried by the police during their nighttime walks. Eventually one prostitute pointed out Härm as a violence-prone customer, while others called him stingy, shy and nervous. None of the 200 women interviewed indicated any connection between da Costa and Teet Härm.

In spite of the weakness of the suspicions, Teet Härm was arrested and jailed in the beginning of December, five months after the first parts of the body had been found. But interrogations turned up nothing, apart from his admission that he had visited prostitutes a couple of times, and Härm was released five days later. An important consequence, however, was that the promising young medical investigator had lost his job. Stigmatized as a murderous monster and easily identifiable in the evening newspapers, he moved to the countryside. Teet Härm later attempted suicide with an overdose of Methadone, which caused him severe hearing impairment.

At the same time that the medical investigator Härm had been disgraced in the media, a huge panic about incest was spreading in Sweden. Fathers were accused of raping their daughters and many were convicted based on flimsy or no evidence. One of the women targeted by the panic was Christina Allgén. She was married to the doctor Thomas Allgén, who was working as a general practitioner in Alingsås, in western Sweden. The couple had a daughter Karin who was merely 18 months old. Christina went from clinic to clinic for a long time with the small girl, falsely convinced that Thomas had violated their daughter. But in spite of extensive investigations, she found no support for her panic.

The Allgén couple had previously had superficial contact with Teet Härm after Härm had helped Thomas Allgén at a study visit to the clinic for medical investigation as part of his training. When Christina Allgén became aware that Härm was appointed a monster by the media, she forebade Thomas from even mentioning the name Härm.

Concurrently, Christina Allgén interviewed her daughter about what the mother thought the daughter had been subjected to. On scraps of paper, the mother wrote “the head of the lady was thrown into a trashcan”. Or ”they were eating eyes and drinking blood ”, and further that ”you can cut ladies like the garden and daddy”. Much of what the 18-month-old girl was made to say by her mother was recorded, and came to play a decisive role in the early processes, along with the testimony of Christina Allgén herself. No one took notice of the young age of the girl, or the leading questions posed to her by her mother. Nobody questioned what a child of that age would really be able to remember.

Thomas Allgén was interrogated about the statements from the daughter for many hours, inquired about incest and his contacts with Teet Härm, but police got nowhere. Then came the assassination of prime minister Olof Palme in 1986, which led to the murder investigation against Härm and Allgén being closed down.

A bit over a year later the investigation was resumed, now led by a police officer who had no experience with investigating homicide cases. That gave Christina Allgén ample playing room, and the new investigator took all she said at face value. The garden of the Allgén vacation house was dug up, just as the Härm’s garden in Täby had been dug up previously, without yielding any piece of evidence.

At this point, all the police really had was the information from Christina Allgén, and the claim from the coroner Jovan Rajs that Härm had buried the head of da Costa. Rajs was technically disqualified due to his being Härm’s boss but the police didn’t mind that. Nevertheless, Thomas Allgén was arrested and jailed in the beginning of October 1987, and by the end of the month, Härm was jailed as well.

The Swedish daily Expressen got wind of the affair, and presented the child testimony of Karin as indisputable truth, set in type otherwise reserved for the outbreak of war, and in the media, the three-year-old accusations against Teet Härm reinforced the image of the two monstrous murderers and dismemberers.

The prelude to the 30-year miscarriage of justice, where law was to stand in the way of justice, had now been carved into stone.

In the next part: The tale of the ultra-feminist mob who, along with outrageously lying and biased media, made sure that the two doctors had their lives destroyed.

Link to Dispatch International: http://www.d-intl.com/

By Anders Carlgren

Lockerbie - Yet Again the Clues Lead to a Palestinian Terrorist Group

Skriver idag i senaste numret av Dispatch International. Länk längst ner.

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack over Lockerbie in Scotland. 270 persons were killed by a bomb aboard Pan Am Flight 103 in transit between London Heathrow and New York, just a few days before Christmas 1988. Today everyone involved knows that the conviction of Libyan Abdelbaset Al Megrahi was based on a fraudulent mock trial. Thus, the investigators are now back to looking at the original suspects, the Palestinian terrorist organization PFLP-GC. That involves two Palestinians serving lifetime sentences in Sweden. But the trail has never been properly investigated, explains journalist Anders Carlgren, who has followed the scandal since it first began.

 

On the shortest day of the year, December 21^st 1988, at 6:30 PM, the giant Pan Am jumbo jet took off from London Heathrow, destination New York. The plane, which had suffered an 18 minute delay, reached its cruise altitude of 10,000 meters over the tiny Scottish town of Lockerbie.

Then it blew up. Half a kilo of Semtex placed in a suitcase located in the front portside luggage compartment blew a hole of several square meters in the fuselage. 175,000 liters of jet fuel exploded, and tore Flight 103 to shreds. Only a dull bang was heard in the skies over Lockerbie, but soon afterwards 259 tattered bodies, Christmas presents and wreckage rained on the town, distributed over several square kilometers. The cockpit landed fairly intact on the ground. Eleven persons on the ground were killed as their houses were destroyed. A crater in the middle of town threw up around an estimated 1,500 tons of earth and building materials. Two Swedes were among those killed, the diplomat Bernt Carlsson and flight hostess Siv Engström.

It was the worst terrorist attack to date. Investigators spent a lot of time piecing together the wreckage in a makeshift hangar, and they soon found the remains of the bomb. A brown Samsonite suitcase had contained the bomb, which had been built into a Toshiba radio, detonated by a timer. The suitcase also contained clothes, which were traced to a shop in Malta.

The intention had been to blow up the airplane over the Atlantic, so that it would be buried there forever, but due to the delay at Heathrow, the bomb exploded over land.

Authorities soon pointed towards the Palestinian terrorist organization PFLP-GC, based in Syria, and its leader Ahmed Jibril. The attack on Pan Am was meant as revenge by Iran after the American warship USS Vincennes had mistakenly shot down an Iranian Airbus with 290 pilgrims on their way to Mecca. Ayatollah Khomeini said after the shooting that ”the sky must be raining blood”.

Just two months before the Lockerbie bombing, West German police had cracked down on a terrorist cell outside of Düsseldorf, apprehending 17 members of none other than PFLP-GC. The most important find was four Semtex bombs build into Toshiba radios.

But a fifth bomb had gone missing, and it turned out that it had been hidden by the bomb builder of the terrorist cell, Marwan Kreeshat. The legendary European correspondent for ABC News Pierre Salinger later interviewed Kreeshat in prison. In that interview Kreeshat said that he was convinced that it was precisely his bomb that had brought down Pan Am Flight 103. It is also documented that during the fall of 1988, great sums were transferred from Iran to the German terrorist cell, in several batches via a variety of Middle Eastern banks.

But the Palestinian-Iranian trail sudden went cold and non-existent in August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. That invasion and the first Gulf war entirely changed the direction of the investigation, documentably at American request. During the preparation for the war, it was important to keep both Syria and Iran calm. The PFLP-GC was now entirely uninteresting and – unexpectedly – the rogue state Libya was pointed to as responsible for the act. The United Nations complied with a request to impose extensive sanctions against Libya.

One of the persons no longer under investigation was the Swedish-Palestinian Mohammed Abu Talb, then a resident of Uppsala. He had entered Sweden on a false passport. Abu Talb probably had ties to the German terrorist cell, as he and three other Swedish-Palestinians repeatedly traveled to places like Frankfurt and Munich. Abu Talb had a background as chief of bodyguard forces in Lebanon and in Syria, and in the Soviet Union he had received training in handling targeting robots.

Today many investigators and relatives of victims are convinced that Abu Talb obtained the fifth Semtex bomb and had it loaded onto the airplane in Frankfurt, where Pan Am 103 had begun its route. It was determined that the bomb-containing suitcase had been loaded without belonging to any passenger.

Three years before the Lockerbie bombing, in 1985, Abu Talb along with three Palestinian co-conspirators were behind the bombing of a synagogue in Copenhagen and similar bombs against airplane companies in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, both of which caused much death and destruction.

In May 1989 the four terrorists were apprehended in Sweden, and December 21^st, one year after Lockerbie, Mohammed Abu Talb and Marten Imandi were sentenced to life prison. The two others received significantly milder punishments.

Investigations showed that Abu Talb had been in Malta during the fall of 1988, and that Marten Imandi had stayed in Malta for a longer period. In the Uppsala home of Abu Talb, police also found a calendar with a circle around December 21^st. And in a recorded wiretap , the Abu Talb’s wife was heard saying to someone else: ”get rid of the clothes immediately.” A suitcase similar to the one holding the bomb was found at that person’s residence.

Both Abu Talb and Marten Imandi are now free after having had their life sentences converted. Abu Talb was also sentenced to deportation, but is nevertheless still in Sweden, as the government cannot decide which country he is to be deported to – Egypt, Syria or Lebanon. He has repeatedly applied to have his deportation cancelled, most recently last year, but his application was turned down every time. Marten Imandi, however, cannot be deported, as he is a Swedish citizen.

But this Swedish trail to the Lockerbie bombing has never been followed to the end, after the US and Great Britain surprisingly pointed to Libya as the guilty party. After many long and hard negotiations, Moammar Gadaffi agreed to turn over two Libyans to a special Scottish court located at an old military base in the Netherlands. After two rounds of mock trial, one of them, Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, was convicted to 27 years of prison. Gadaffi paid 2.7 billion dollars to the relatives of the victims. The sanctions were lifted, and in return, Great Britain obtained profitable oil contracts. Al Megrahi was returned to Libya in 2009, where he died later from prostate cancer.

We know today that the owner of the shop in Malta, Tony Gauci, who sold the clothes found in the bomber’s suitcase, lied when he pointed out Al Megrahi in a confrontation; he had been shown a picture of Al Megrahi in advance. We also know that Tony Gauci received two million dollars from the US for testifying in the two mock trials. There are many other errors and repeatedly changing explanations in his testimony.

Abu Talb was also forced to testify during the trials, but he denied any kind of involvement, and claimed that he had been babysitting in Uppsala at the time. That alibi, however, has never been verified.

A year ago, Scottish newspapers published an 800-page report of he investigation from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which had been classified since 2007. The report pointed out extensive lying, fraud, perjury, bought witnesses and other mistakes during the legal process.

Mohammed Abu Talb and his terrorist associates in Sweden and Germany do not enjoy immunity from the Scottish authorities. Therefore there are good reasons to resume investigation of the Swedish-Palestinian trail.

Länk till Dispatch International, där artikeln finns i både svensk och engelsk version. http://www.d-intl.com/?lang=sv

Uppdatering den 17 februari 2013: Den skotske professorn i juridik, Robert Black, har på sin sajt lagt upp större delen av denna artikel. http://lockerbiecase.blogspot.se/

Professsor Black är en av de mest vederhäftiga kritikerna av hela Lockerbieskandalen. Ironiskt nog var han en av arkitekterna bakom upprättandet av domstolen i Kamp van den Zeist i Holland som dömde Abdelbaset Al Megrahi. Därefter tog Robert Black kraftigt avstånd från hur de båda rättegångarna genomfördes. Han har också skrivit en lång rad artiklar om fallet.

Här är mannen bakom Stay Behind i Sverige

Skriver idag på Newsmill om Stay Behind, en av de tre svenska motståndsrörelser som bildades under kalla krigets dagar, och som existerade långt in på 1980-talet. Efter andra världskrigets slut inrättades sådana paramilitära nätverk över hela Västeuropa med det hemliga namnet Stay Behind. I debatten om eventuella kopplingar till mordet på Olof Palme kallas samtliga av de paramilitära nätverken för Stay Behind, vilket är missvisande. Det var enbart de av USA initierade nätverken som hade det namnet.

I de skandinaviska länderna hette organisatören William Colby och med Stockholm som bas. Många år senare var han en lika uppskattad, alternativt avskydd CIA-chef. Jag är den ende journalist som två gånger mötte Colby, utsänd av SR respektive SVT, för att intervjua honom om hans två år i Sverige.

Detta är en betydligt längre artikel, jämfört med vad jag tidigare skrivit om mina möten med Bill Colby.

 

En regnig novembermorgon 1950 klev den då blott 30-årige krigsveteranen William Colby av en lokalbuss på Constitution Avenue i Washington. Bill, som han kallades, tog några varv runt kvarteret för att kontrollera att ingen följde efter honom. Så styrde han stegen mot de nedslitna baracker, mitt emot The Mall, som vid den här tiden var CIAs första högkvarter. Spionorganisationen var då bara tre år gammal och hade efterträtt OSS, som verkat under kriget. Under nästan hela kriget hade Bill Colby jobbat för OSS bakom fiendens linjer i Tyskland, Frankrike och mot slutskedet sprängt järnvägar i Norge för att hindra de tyska ockupanternas framfart.

Själv trodde Colby att CIA kanske ville värva honom till Koreakriget, men i själva verket ville man ha honom till ett jobb som var rakt motsatt den vågade operatörens nattliga fallskärmshopp över ett Europa som stod i brand. Operatören Bill Colby var erkänt skicklig, framför allt när det gällde sabotageverksamhet, med sprängningar av vägar och broar som specialitet.

Nu ville man att han skulle organisera motståndsrörelser i de skandinaviska länderna. Det var kalla krigets dagar och Stalin satt fortfarande i Kreml. De flesta ledarna i väst var livrädda för att ryssarna skulle vända hungriga blickar väster om järnridån och i så fall skulle motståndsrörelserna stanna kvar - Stay Behind. Just de skandinaviska länderna hade av CIA fått högsta prioritet.

Bill Colby skrev på alla hemliga papper, fick ett skrivbord i en av barackerna som var överfullt med diverse dokument och spionrapporter från de skandinaviska länderna. Bakom sig på väggen nålade han upp en detaljerad karta över området. Han gjorde långa listor över materiel som skulle placeras ut i framtiden. Det var vapen, mängder med ammunition, klädförråd, matförråd, kommunikationsutrustning, plus allt annat som en motståndsgrupp kan tänkas behöva.

Sin fritid ägnade Colby åt hustrun Barbara och de två barnen, samtidigt som han grubblade över sin omvandling från fallskärmsjägare med sabotage i blicken till någon sorts stillsam korgosse bakom ett skrivbord. Till de vänner som frågade vad han sysslade med nu för tiden sa han bara att han jobbade för the government. För de som lyssnade var det svaret detsamma som CIA.

Det dröjde inte länge förrän han kallades till sin gamle OSS-boss från tiden som sabotör i Norge, Gerry Miller.

“All right, Bill, get on with it then”, Miller said. “What we want is a good solid intelligence and resistance network that we can count on if the Russkis ever take over those countries. We have some initial planning, but it needs to be filled out and implemented. You will work for Lou Scherer until we see what more needs to be done.”

Lou Scherer var vid den tiden chef för den västeuropeiska divisionens skandinaviska avdelning inom CIA. Gerry Miller och Scherer ville stationera honom i Stockholm för att på plats organisera verksamheten. Colby diskuterade saken hemma med Barbara innan han accepterade. Och redan i april 1951 landade hela familjen i Stockholm. Hans cover var som politisk attaché vid USAs ambassad. Det var en något innovativ titel för en diplomat som i själva verket hörde till avdelningen OPC inom CIA. Inom den avdelningen sköttes ekonomisk och psykologisk krigföring, plus paramilitära operationer.

Han var nu hemlig agent som arbetade under cover i fredstid, vilket krävde nya kunskaper som hemliga brevlådor ute i det fria, plantera avlyssningsutrustning, hemliga mötesplatser, hantera osynligt bläck och mikropunkter, miniatyrkameror och allt annat som hörde till den tidens spionage.

Familjen fann sig snart väl tillrätta i Stockholm och Barbara Colby var mästerlig i konsten att skaffa svenska vänner. Och i den kretsen fanns snabbt allt från medlemmar av hovet till skilda politiker. Bill Colby intresserade sig särskilt för socialdemokraten Sven Aspling, som vid den här tiden var partisekreterare och därmed också nära medarbetare till statsminister Erlander. Han umgicks också med en del personer inom den svenska underrättelsetjänsten, eftersom de mycket väl visste vad Colby egentligen sysslade med.

I två av de skandinaviska länderna ville de lokala underrättelsetjänsterna inte samarbeta med Colby, eftersom han tillhörde CIA. Men i de två andra länderna var samarbetet gott. Ett av de mera vänligt sinnade länderna var med stor sannolikhet Sverige, då det finns en del spår av möten mellan högt uppsatta tjänstemän inom CIA och den svenska underrättelsetjänsten. Och här fanns också amerikanska medborgare verksamma. På några håll i Skandinavien fanns till och med så kallade assets, agenter som kunde agera helt på egen hand men utan diplomatiskt skydd, till exempel med så kallade våta jobb, vilket oftast innebar att helt undanröja någon person. Mötena med dessa personer var särskilt hemliga och skedde alltid i säkra våningar eller hus, efter kontakter via telefonautomater och speciella koder. Trots säkerhetsåtgärderna var sådana mötet ganska grå och handlade oftast om att lämna pengar som skulle föras över gränsen till ett grannland.

I Sverige kultiverade han också politiska flyktingar och dissidenter från Östblocket, särskilt från de baltiska staterna, Polen, Ungern, Rumänien och Ukraina. Den vägen fick han många gånger värdefull underrättelseinformation.

Bill Colby var nu i full gång med att rekrytera inhemskt folk till sina fyra skandinaviska nätverk och reste flitigt mellan länderna. Resorna gick nästan alltid med bil, eftersom han oftast hade någon utrustning med sig för att leverera. Utrustningen kom ursprungligen från USA, Västtyskland och Storbritannien och till England skickade han också både ledare och rekryter för att utbildas av brittiska SAS-befäl i någon sorts elementär gerillateknik och taktik. Antalet i de enskilda nätverken varierade i antal mellan 100 och 200 män. Inför varje rekrytering spanade Colby själv eller någon av hans män på och noga undersökte bakgrunden hos personer som kunde tänkas ingå i det hemliga nätverket. Han skaffade sig också ”mellanmän”, som kunde styra och träna medlemmar av nätverken utan att Colbys egen identitet blev avslöjad.

Inför en leverans av utrustning från Sverige hade Bill Colby lastat bakluckan på sin bil så full med utrustning att den nästan gick på fälgen. Med hustru och barn som cover i bilen for sällskapet mot ett färjeläge, där man stoppades av tullen eftersom bilen var så tungt lastad. Men med sitt diplomatpass klarade han sig igenom. Det var en av få gånger han visade upp sin riktiga identitet för någon okänd svensk. I vanliga fall rörde han sig med skilda alias. Att man skulle passera ett färjeläge skvallrar om att man var på väg antingen till Finland eller till Danmark.

På så sätt byggdes sakta men säkert hemliga förråd upp i de olika länderna. I andra fall kunde det röra sig om att gömma undan särskilt värdefull militär kommunikationsutrustning på någon avlägsen lantgård.

Till uppgifterna hörde också att flytta stora mängder svensk litteratur och inspelad musik utomlands inför risken av en sovjetisk ockupation. Det var material som i så fall skulle användas i exil och riktat mot ett ockuperat Sverige.

Det fanns även långtgående planer på att sätta upp hemliga tryckerier som skulle kunna användas för antisovjetisk propaganda. Men de planerna blev aldrig verklighet, därför att kring årsskiftet 1952-1953 började CIAs intresse för Sverige och övriga Skandinavien svalna. Istället var det Wien och Berlin som var de huvudsakliga attraktionerna på den europeiska kartan. Och samtidigt var de skandinaviska nätverken närmast färdiga, så långt man nu kunde komma i fredstid.

Bill Colby blev sommaren 1953 erbjuden att flytta till ambassaden i Rom och där fortsatte han ungefär samma arbete, att bygga upp en motståndsrörelse. I Italien gick nätverket under namnet Gladio och förblev hemligt ända fram till 1990.

Ganska exakt 35 år efter hans flytt till Italien var jag hösten 1988 utsänd av Sveriges Radio till Washington för att bevaka valrörelsen mellan Michael Dukakis och George Bush d. ä. Vid ett tillfälle fick jag ett tips om att den gamle CIA-chefen Bill Colby kanske var beredd att berätta om sin tid i Stockholm och den svenska motståndsrörelsen.

Han bodde i Georgetowns norra utkanter, på Dent Place. Och i telefon var det en mycket vänlig och korrekt man som välkomnade mig till sitt hem påföljande dag.

Aningen förbluffad över lättheten att nå den gamle spionchefen promenerade jag upp längs 30th Street. När jag svängde vänster in på Dent Place i höstsolen hade jag den gången ingen aning om att ministern vid svenska ambassaden, Ulf Hjertonsson, bodde mindre än 100 meter bort, på Avon Place. De båda herrarna var så gott som grannar.

Dörren öppnades av den då 68-årige Colby. Lätt grånad med strikt bakåtstruket hår och klädd i en enkel slipover över en skjorta uppknäppt i halsen. Han visade mig in i ett hem fyllt av bilder från sin karriär. Jag fastnade särskilt framför en bild tagen inne i ett transportplan strax innan Colby skulle hoppa ut bakom fiendens linjer någonstans i Europa under andra världskriget.

Längs en vägg hängde säkert ett 30-tal minnesbilder från andra världskriget, vidare bilder som CIAs hårt kritiserade stationschef i Saigon under Vietnamkriget och lite längre bort bilder från CIAs högkvarter i Langley som spionorganisationens omstridde chef. Där fanns också bilder från Ovala rummet i Vita huset tillsammans med både Richard Nixon och Gerald Ford, plus ett antal snapshots från olika kongressförhör med Bill Colby själv i huvudrollen.  Längst bort hängde en revolver, en silverfärgad Smith & Wesson med lång pipa.

“Jodå”, svarade han på min första fråga, “visst var det jag som startade Stay Behind i början av 1950-talet och inte bara i Sverige, utan över hela Skandinavien.”

Genom hela intervjun undvek han noga att röja vad han exakt gjorde i de olika länderna. Han talade bara i ganska allmänna ordalag vad han hade gjort, utan att nämna något specifikt land. Han berättade om metoder som hämtade ur en spionroman, men som i vissa fall används än idag. Till exempel hemliga brevlådor utomhus, eller säkra hus och lägenheter för hemliga möten.

Vi satt i trädgården på baksidan av hans lilla men eleganta townhouse och jag frågade om han verkligen trodde att dessa motståndets nätverk skulle fungera i händelse av en sovjetisk ockupation.

”Jag har alltid undrat över om det verkligen skulle ha fungerat under sovjetiskt styre i ett eller flera av de skandinaviska länderna. Vi vet från andra länder att det inte fungerade.” Här nämnde Bill Colby Kina och Albanien som främsta exempel och pekade också ut Polen och Nordvietnam.

”De uppbyggda moståndsnätet i alla de länderna fungerade inte, de penetrerades från utsidan. Så det är helt möjligt att mina nätverk skulle ha förlorats vid en verklig rysk invasion. Men jag trodde då och tror fortfarande att en del av arbetet och den materiel vi skeppade över skulle klara sig. Det skulle alltid finnas ett antal människor som skulle slåss för sin frihet.”

När min bandspelare slutat snurra gick vi igenom en rad detaljer i verksamheten, för så var villkoren, inga detaljer på band. Utan namns nämnande berättade han då om hur han kultiverade socialdemokraternas Sven Aspling, ett namn som senare ändå var lätt att identifiera. Vidare om hur han ett oräkneligt antal gånger kört en fullastad bil med hemlig utrustning över till ett annat land.

Colby berättade också om sitt högkvarter på amerikanska ambassaden och att ambassadören aldrig fick veta vad han egentligen höll på med. På så sätt skulle ambassadören helt sanningsenligt kunna säga att han ingenting visste om nu Bill Colby och hans nätverk skulle avslöjas. På samma sätt förblev han hemlig för de flesta av nätverkens fotfolk, den kommunikationen sköttes helt av ett fåtal män som fanns i hans närhet.

Vidare fanns det amerikansk kommunikationsutrustning och diverse förråd på ganska många platser runt om och över snart sagt hela Skandinavien. Förråden bestod av allt från köttkonserver till vapen och ammunition.

Bill Colby betonade särskilt betydelsen av hur han kom till insikt om värdet av utbyte av information mellan olika skandinaviska länders underrättelsetjänster och USA. Det hade han inte haft en aning om under sin tid som operatör under andra världskriget. Det var också nu han förstod värdet av avhoppare som lyckats ta sig över järnridån och på skandinavisk mark lämna detaljerade informationer om militära förhållanden på andra sidan.

Efter vårt långa samtal lämnade jag Bill Colby och Dent Place, helt övertygad om att jag hade ett scoop i mina händer. Men ack, vad jag hade bedragit mig själv.

Långt senare lärde jag mig nämligen att den gamle spionchefen hade berättat hela sin story i sina memoarer hela tio år tidigare, alltså redan 1978 och med titeln “Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA”.

Mitt enda försvar är att det fanns inget internet och inte ens i min vildaste fantasi kunde jag föreställa mig att en före detta chef för CIA skulle publicera någon memoarbok. Och den okunskapen hindrade mig inte från att några år senare göra om min intervju med Colby.

Den här gången var jag Aktuellts korrespondent i Washington och svaren på mina frågor blev ungefär desamma. Jag är dessutom ganska säker på att denna andra intervju drunknade antingen i det pågående första Irak-kriget eller i Sovjetunionens sönderfall.

Bill Colby avled i april 1996 i en kanotolycka, längs oändligt vackra Potomac River uppströms i Maryland, och som också flyter genom Washington och mynnar i Chesapeake Bay. Då hans kropp återfanns några dagar senare fanns det personer som hävdade att han mördats som hämnd för sina gärningar i CIAs namn. Andra pekade i riktning mot drunkning, hjärtinfarkt eller stroke. Den verkliga dödsorsaken har aldrig offentliggjorts.

William Bill Colby var starkt troende katolik och som sådan kallades han ibland gemenligen för krigsprästen under sina 32 år inom först OSS och därefter CIA. När den döda kroppen hade hittats sa en av Colbys äldsta vänner ”Han hade väl fått nog av sitt liv”.

 

Länk till artikeln på Newsmill: http://www.newsmill.se/artikel/2013/01/29/h-r-r-mannen-bakom-stay-behind-i-sverige

Gruppen Stay behind kopplas till Palmemordet

Den frispråkiga förra revisorn i FN, Inga Britt Ahlenius kopplar i en DN-artikel idag den svenska delen av den så kallade Stay behind–rörelsen till Palmemordet och kräver att det spåret utreds ordentligt. Vi är flera journalister som skrivit om Stay behind, men så vitt jag vet är jag den ende som intervjuat rörelsens organisatör i Sverige och hela Skandinavien, nämligen Bill Colby.

Han var vid tiden amerikansk resident på USAs ambassad i Stockholm och blev 20 år senare chef för hela CIA, mitt under brinnande Vietnamkrig. Därför väljer jag nu att än en gång publicera vad jag skrev om de mötena med Colby vid slutet av 80-talet och i början av 90-talet. Artikeln publicerade jag första gången 25 mars 2011.

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CIA-chefen Bill Colby startade svenska motståndsrörelsen

Slag i slag presenteras nu detaljer ur SvD-reporten Miakel Holmströms bok, “Den dolda alliansen – Sveriges hemliga Nato-förbindelser”. Det handlar om svenskar som under kalla kriget organiserade en hemlig motståndsrörelse som i händelse av en sovjetisk ockupation skulle träda i aktion. Den som initierade de hemliga grupperna över hela Skandinavien 1951 var William Bill Colby, som då var en av CIAs residenter på ambassaden i Stockholm. Drygt tjugo år senare blev han chef för CIA, med fortsatt insyn i de skandinaviska hemliga paramilitära grupperna. Hela operationen kallades Stay Behind.

Under hösten 1988 var jag tillfälligt stationerad i Washington DC, utsänd av Sveriges Radio för att följa valkampanjen mellan George Bush och Michael Dukakis. Helt överraskande nåddes jag en dag av ett tips om att den gamle CIA-chefen Bill Colby kanske var beredd att berätta om sin tid i Stockholm mellan 1951 och 1953 och den svenska motståndsrörelsen.

Lika överraskande fann jag att hans nummer var helt öppet i telefonkatalogen och att han bodde i Georgetowns norra utkanter, på Dent Place, bara några kvarter från mitt hotell. Och i telefon var det en mycket vänlig och korrekt man som välkomnade mig till sitt hem påföljande dag.

Aningen förbluffad över lättheten att nå den gamle spionchefen för en intervju promenerade jag upp längs 30th Street. När jag svängde vänster in på Dent Place i höstsolen hade jag den gången ingen aning om att ministern vid Svenska ambassaden, Ulf Hjertonsson, bodde mindre än 100 meter bort, på Avon Place. De båda herrarna var så gott som grannar.

På yttertrappan till hans townhouse stod en frankerad brevbunt med gummisnodd runt om. Bunten skulle hämtas av brevbäraren, för så fungerade US Mail på den tiden.

Dörren öppnades av den då 68-årige Colby. Lätt grånad med strikt bakåtstruket hår och klädd i en enkel slipover över en skjorta uppknäppt i halsen. Han visade mig in i ett hem fyllt av bilder från sin karriär. Jag fastnade särskilt framför en bild tagen inne i ett transportplan strax innan Colby skulle hoppa ut bakom fiendens linjer någonstans i Europa under andra världskriget för att arbeta med någon av motståndsrörelserna och störa tyskarna.

Han gjorde om samma sak en gång till innan han i krigets slutskede förflyttades till Norge med sabotageoperationer, mot de tyska ockupanterna, som uppdrag.

Längs en vägg hängde säkert ett 30-tal minnesbilder från andra världskriget, vidare bilder som CIAs hårt kritiserade stationschef i Saigon under Vietnamkriget och lite längre bort bilder från CIAs högkvarter i Langley som spionorganisationens omstridde chef. Där fanns också bilder från Ovala rummet i Vita huset tillsammans med både Richard Nixon och Gerald Ford, plus ett antal snapshots från olika kongressförhör med Bill Colby själv i huvudrollen.  Längst bort hängde en revolver, en silverfärgad Smith & Wesson med lång pipa.

“Jodå”, svarade han på min första fråga, “visst var det jag som startade operation stay behind i början av 1950-talet och inte bara i Sverige, utan över hela Skandinavien.”

Colby berättade vidare hur han spanade på och noga undersökte bakgrunden hos personer som kunde tänkas ingå i den hemliga organisationen. Från USA och från västtyska förråd levererades utrustning, allt från konserver till hemliga radioapparater som skulle placeras i olika förråd i de skandinaviska länderna.

Lojaliteten förbjöd honom genom hela intervjun, som tyvärr bara delvis fick bandas, att röja något specifikt land, men vid ett tillfälle förstod jag att det rörde sig antingen om Danmark eller Finland.

Bill Colby berättade att han inför en leverans hade lastat bakluckan på sin bil så full med utrustning att den nästan gick på fälgen. Med hustru och barn som cover i bilen for sällskapet mot ett färjeläge, där man stoppades av tullen eftersom bilen var så tungt lastad. Men med sitt diplomatpass klarade han sig igenom. Det var en av få gånger han visade upp sin riktiga identitet för någon okänd svensk. I vanliga fall rörde han sig med skilda alias.

När banden på min Nagra definitivt hade slutat snurra, berättade Colby också att han nästan vanemässigt sökte kontakt med ledande socialdemokrater, inte minst i Sverige. Först flera år senare förstod jag att den han främst försökt kultivera var dåvarande partisekreteraren, Sven Aspling. Både svenska och utländska medier har vid flera tillfällen rapporterat att 1950, året innan Colby kom till Stockholm ska amerikanska ambassaden ha försökt värva Olof Palme, men resultatet av det värvningsförsöket är än idag höljt i dunkel.

Efter bara två år i Stockholm hade Bill Colby skapat ett helt skandinaviskt “stay behind network”, med utbildat manskap, hemliga förråd och utrustning. Där fanns också amerikanska civila medborgare som bodde i Skandinavien och som utförde enklare tjänster. Till detta kom också vad som kallades för “assets”, vilket är ett klassiskt kodord för operatörer som agerar utan diplomatiskt skydd, till deras uppgifter hörde så kallade våta jobb.

1953 var Colby färdig med Stockholm, det var inte längre den spioncentral staden hade varit under kriget och han accepterade ett erbjudande att flytta till Rom, som tillsammans med Berlin, Wien och Hongkong var de nya spionstäderna på modet.

Efter en dryg timmes samtal och bandad intervju lämnade jag Bill Colby och Dent Place, helt övertygad om att jag hade ett scoop i mina händer. Men ack, vad jag hade bedragit mig själv. Långt senare lärde jag mig nämligen att den gamle spionchefen hade berättat hela sin story i sina memoarer hela tio år tidigare, alltså redan 1978 och med titeln “Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA”. Kapitlet om de två åren i Stockholm är 30 sidor och bär rubriken “A Skandinavian Spy”.

Mitt enda försvar är att det fanns inget internet och inte ens i min vildaste fantasi kunde jag föreställa mig att en före detta chef för CIA skulle publicera någon memoarbok. Men det hindrade mig inte från att några år senare göra om min bravado interview med Colby.

Den här gången var jag Aktuellts korrespondent i Washington och svaren på mina frågor blev ungefär desamma. Jag är dessutom ganska säker på att denna andra intervju drunknade antingen i det pågående första Irak-kriget eller i Sovjetunionens sönderfall.

När jag nu 23 år efter den första intervjun bläddrar i hans memoarer faller mina ögon på det avsnitt som handlar om hur Colby hamnade i Stockholm efter att ha startat den hemliga operationen redan i högkvarteret i Langley. Han blev inkallad till sin gamle OSS-boss från tiden som sabotör i Norge, Gerry Miller.

“All right, Bill, get on with it then”, Miller said. “What we want is a good solid intelligence and resistance network that we can count on if the Russkis ever take over those countries. We have some initial planning, but it needs to be filled out and implemented. You will work for Lou Scherer until we see what more needs to be done.”

Lou Scherer var vid den tiden chef för den västeuropeiska divisionens skandinaviska avdelning inom CIA.

Efter de så hårt kritiserade åren som CIAs stationschef i Saigon, mitt under brinnande Vietnamkrig, blev Bill Colby 1973 CIAs högste chef. Han efterträddes 1976 av ingen mindre än George Herbert Walker Bush, men han i sin tur, stannade bara på den posten under 357 dagar fram till dess Jimmy Carter tillträdde som president.

Svenskhuset på Avon Place, som låg så nära Colbys townhouse på Dent Place, förblev svenskt. Kort tid efter att Ulf Hjertonsson blivit ambassadör i Madrid, flyttade Svenska Dagbladets korrespondent, Lars Christiansson in. Och efter honom hette hyresgästen Ingmar Björkstén, som kom från tjänsten som kulturchef på Svenska Dagbladet och nu hade utsetts till svensk kulturattaché. Alla tre tillhörde mina vänner i Washington och Ingmar förblev min outtröttlige mentor och kritiker ända fram till sin död 2002.

Bill Colby avled den 27 april 1996 i en kanotolycka, längs den oändligt vackra Potomac River, uppströms i Maryland, och som också flyter genom Washington DC och mynnar i Chesapeake Bay. Då hans kropp återfanns nio dagar senare fanns det personer som hävdade att han mördats som hämnd för sina gärningar i CIAs namn. Andra pekade i riktning mot drunkning, hjärtinfarkt eller stroke. Såvitt jag vet har den verkliga dödsorsaken aldrig offentliggjorts.

William Bill Colby var starkt troende katolik och som sådan kallades han ibland gemenligen för krigsprästen under sina 32 år inom först OSS och därefter CIA. Han blev 76 år.

Länk till Inga Britt Ahlenius artikel på DN/Debatt:

http://www.dn.se/debatt/hemlig-motstandsrorelse-kopplas-till-palmemordet