Ghost Hunt: The US destabilisation campaign against Sweden: Cold war and covert action on Europe's Northern Flank by Pelle Neroth Taylor

Author:Pelle Neroth Taylor [Taylor, Pelle Neroth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UNKNOWN
Published: 2015-04-08T12:00:00+00:00

8. Admissions and denials

All through this period, Bildt, and a number of naval officers, continued to deny that western vessels ever intruded in Swedish waters. In 2000, however, there was another nail in the coffin for this stance, which would require all of Bildt's verbal talents to explain away. Swedish television interviewed Caspar Weinberger, the former US secretary for defence. One of the leading hawks in the Reagan administration, a close associate of the likes of CIA chief Bill Casey, Weinberger is best known in Britain as the leading Anglophile who ensured the Administration did all it could to help Britain over the Falklands war that same year, 1982, as the mysterious submarine intrusions into Sweden.

He told Swedish TV on the record that US submarines carried out training missions in Swedish waters regularly. These are Weinberger's exact words, on Swedish television (interviewed in retirement in his office in Washington, in 2000). Worth quoting in full because so many in Sweden, on the Deep State side, denied that Weinberger had really meant that NATO submarines were in Swedish waters. Here is Weinberger:

“If for example Sweden would have said that you must not have any intrusions of that area in this month that would certainly have been honoured and respected by NATO... What I am saying is that at no time, to my knowledge, did NATO simply send a submarine directly into Swedish waters without consultations and prior discussions and agreements that that could be done. Under those circumstances, it was not a pressing problem. It was part of a routine regular scheduled series of defence testing that NATO did and indeed had to do to be responsible and liable... [The “Whiskey on the Rocks”] was a clear violation, and submarines can get in where they are not wanted, and that is exactly why we made this defensive testing and these defensive maneuvers to assure that they would not be able to do that without being detected. That particular submarine [the Whiskey on the Rocks] was quite visible to everybody, and it was exactly the kind of thing that NATO was trying to test the defences to not permit it to happen.

“It was very much in Sweden’s interest that that would not happen ... Besides that one intrusion of the Whiskey-class submarine, there were no violations, no capabilities of the Soviets to make an attack that could not be defended against, and that was the mission of NATO, and it required the cooperation of many countries.... The point was that it was necessary to test frequently the capabilities of all countries, not only in the Baltic – which is very strategic, of course – but in the Mediterranean and Asiatic waters and all the rest.”

The Stockholm correspondent of the Associated Press, the world's largest news agency, did a story on the subject: [xlviii] :

``You need some sort of agreement to do a thing like this. But I know nothing of such an agreement,'' said Admiral Per Rudberg, head of the navy from 1978 to 1984.

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