Killing Innocence: The Anniversary of the Assassination of Olof Palme

Some dates are etched into our memories. Most Americans remember where they were on September 11, 2001. Many Germans recall November 9, 1989, the day when the Berlin Wall was opened.

To Swedes of my generation, February 28, 1986, is of the same significance. It was the day my native country lost its innocence.

I was driving a couple of friends from Uppsala, where we were students, to their hometown a few hours down south. After a late dinner down there, I bid them farewell and headed back north again.

Cruising down the highway past midnight, I was listening to the only radio station that broadcast 24 hours a day at the time. It played easy-listening music; there was no news programming from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Suddenly, a newsreader’s voice breaks the pleasant atmosphere: “This is the Swedish national broadcasting company. We interrupt nighttime radio for an extra news bulletin.”

This was unprecedented. In the few seconds that passed as the news desk played its jingle, I thought one of two things had happened: a disaster at a nuclear power plant, or the Soviet Union had launched a full-scale invasion of Sweden.

Both these events were credible threats. This was in 1986, only a few years after the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. (Chernobyl happened later in the spring of ’86.) A Soviet invasion was just as much of a threat at the time. In the Cold War, which would last for another few years, the threat of another world war was real. The fear of an uncontrolled thermonuclear war that the war in Ukraine has caused was something we lived with every day back then, year in and year out. 

Another newsreader reported that Prime Minister Olof Palme was dead. He had been gunned down in central Stockholm earlier that night. He had been rushed to the hospital, where he was officially declared dead.

I was shocked. This could not be real. Things like this did not happen in Sweden. In other countries, yes—less than five years earlier, John Hinckley had tried to shoot President Reagan. That same year, President Sadat of Egypt was killed on live TV. 

We had all read about the assassination of President Kennedy. 

But in Sweden?

I had to pull over at a rest area. I found a phone booth and called my parents. When I told them what had happened, they did not believe me at first. Then they turned on the radio and heard the live broadcast that had replaced the nighttime programming. I also spoke to a couple of truck drivers who were hanging out nearby the phone booth. They, too, had felt the need to stop, get out, and try to grasp what was happening in our country.

We were all in shock. Since my route back home to Uppsala would take me through Stockholm, I decided to drive downtown and up to the scene of the murder. I guess it was my way of convincing myself that this was real.

I got to the scene of the crime about three hours after it had happened. It was a surreal experience. Someone had thrown a bouquet of roses on the ground. The blood stains were still there, and the cordoned-off area was guarded by two police officers.

The question that kept ringing in my head, in the heads of millions of Swedes, was: why?

The murderer has never been caught, and the investigation into the crime has been closed. Therefore, the “why” question will probably never get the answer it needs. We will never know for certain who actually shot Palme, or if the assassin had any co-conspirators. For this reason, of course, it is very unlikely that we will ever know why he was killed. 

That, however, has not kept commentators, investigative journalists, authors, and others from speculating. An abundance of theories has been put forward, ranging from the credible to the fanciful. Here are some examples:

• The CIA ordered the killing and hired a hitman from Operation Longreach, the assassination arm of the South African intelligence service; the motive should have been that Palme was allegedly a dormant spy for the Soviet KGB;
  
• A group of Swedish police officers orchestrated the murder together with individuals from the Swedish military because they thought Palme was a communist and a threat to national security;
  
• The Palme family and the Social Democrats—the party that Palme chaired and represented as prime minister—had decided that he was a burden to them, perhaps even a threat to the country of some sort, and therefore hired a hitman;
  
• Palme staged his own assassination in order to commit suicide;
  
• A career criminal and alcoholic happened upon Palme and his wife, as they were walking home from a late-night movie; the career criminal mistook Palme for a local crime boss that he allegedly had grievances with; he allegedly decided to take the opportunity to settle the score. 

To start with the last one, almost three years after the assassination, a man named Christer Pettersson was arrested and charged with having killed the prime minister and having tried to assassinate his wife (who miraculously survived). Pettersson was found guilty in the local court but was unanimously acquitted by the appeals court. In its ruling, the appeals court rebuked the lower court for basically having created evidence to ‘fill in the blanks’ where no such evidence existed. 

Pettersson was an unlikely assassination candidate, and I am personally convinced that he did not do it. Mr. Leif G. W. Persson, probably the foremost criminologist in Swedish history, has resoundingly rejected Pettersson as the murderer. This career criminal was mentally unstable and incapable of the calculating, cold-blooded behavior that multiple witnesses ascribed to the assassin. It is impossible, Persson explains, that Christer Pettersson, who passed away in 2004, could have committed this crime.

The suggestions that Palme was killed by a plot hatched by inner-circle members of his own party belong in the fanciful category. Likewise, not a shred of evidence has ever surfaced that would in any way incriminate Palme’s own family. The staged suicide idea is about as credible as a five-legged unicorn.

The only reasonable explanation of the murder—again without definitive evidence—is that Olof Palme was targeted by some intelligence service. The hitman was given ground-level support by people with knowledge of Palme’s habits, normal police operations, and the geography of downtown Stockholm.

This brings us back to the question of why Palme was assassinated. The idea that the motive was political in nature is compatible with Palme’s political character, and with the broader political trends of that time. 

Palme was a staunch socialist and fierce critic of the United States, in particular its war in Vietnam. There is a famous picture of Palme marching in a war protest alongside the leader of the North Vietnamese guerilla, the FNL. In his Christmas speech in 1972, Palme compared the U.S. Air Force’s 11-day bombing campaign that year, formally known as Operation Linebacker II, to the Nazi extermination camp Treblinka. 

Among the more damning pieces of information regarding Palme, we find statements by Olof Frånstedt, former head of counter-espionage at SÄPO, the Swedish intelligence service. In an interview published on Youtube as part of a broader journalistic project on the Palme murder, Frånstedt explains that both the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and British MI-6 had strong reasons to believe that Palme was a dormant KGB agent. 

This is a serious accusation, of course, one that is difficult to back up with independent evidence. Mr. Frånstedt is firm in his account of how he was shown the files on Palme by James Jesus Angleton, chief of counter espionage at CIA for 20 years, and by Peter McCabe, who held the equivalent position at MI-6. At the same time, Frånstedt stresses that he made his own independent evaluation of the information he was given. 

While his statements definitely are debatable, let us for the sake of reasoning accept them as truths. What can they tell us about why Palme was killed, and killed at the chosen time?

Palme was scheduled to travel to Moscow for an official visit later in the spring of 1986. If he had the relationship with KGB that the CIA and MI-6 apparently suspected, it is entirely possible that they feared that Palme would shift the balance of political and military power in Sweden, to the advantage of the Soviet Union.

In this context, it would be reasonable that an intelligence agency, or some constellation of agencies, decided to kill Palme before he could do the damage that they suspected him of plotting. 

Again, without a sensational release of classified information, these speculative aspects of the murder will remain just that. At the same time, if he was killed for the reasons mentioned, the conspirators did accomplish a geo-strategic shift in northern Europe. With Palme out of the prime minister’s office, Sweden made a small but notable turn to the West in its foreign policy. The openness toward the Soviet Union that had characterized Palme’s time in power was replaced with a consistent orientation toward America. 

This shift was not tectonic in nature: it remained out of the question until the war in Ukraine that Sweden should join NATO. But the assassin that gunned down a prime minister on a street in downtown Stockholm forever obliterated any doubts about which two Cold War superpowers that Sweden was affiliated with. 

As if a force of nature had gone to work, a strange macro-political imbalance in the Nordic region disappeared. That imbalance had consisted of an unclear dividing line between the east and the west. Norway and Denmark joined NATO already in 1949, while Finland was tied to the Soviet Union through a friendship-and-stability pact aimed at keeping Finland out of the Warsaw Pact, and free of communist dictatorship. 

Sweden was sitting in the middle, formally neutral but—at least under Palme—suspected of leaning toward Moscow. It was never entirely clear what would happen in northern Europe, should a major armed conflict break out.

When Sweden applied for NATO membership last year, it was the country’s last step on a long journey into the complete fellowship of Western-allied nations. 

The death of Olof Palme set in motion an equally transformative process in domestic Swedish politics. His Social Democrat party, which had been closely committed to so-called democratic socialism, began losing its ideological steam. Perhaps coincidentally, it also gradually lost the competence of state leadership that had made the party the preeminent force in Swedish politics. 

While winning the 1988 election, riding on the sympathy wave from the assassination, the Social Democrats lost to a center-right coalition in 1991. Part of the reason for this loss was that the shift in party leadership after Palme’s death had set the party off on a slow but inevitable path of decline. In the late 1980s they still commanded 40-45% of the votes; today, they are a normal-sized European socialist party at or just below 30% electoral support. 

Politics aside, the Palme assassination did something to Sweden that was widely felt throughout my generation: it killed the country’s innocence. We lost our belief in Sweden as being ‘different’ from the rest of the world. We were a nation where ministers of the government traveled by public transport, where there were no armed guards at the parliament, and where—we believed—violent crime was only committed by alcoholics, drug addicts, and mentally disturbed individuals. 

That sense of innocence went up in the smoke from a Smith & Wesson revolver, at the corner of Tunnelgatan and Sveavägen in Stockholm, on February 28, 1986.