One more lush, thought Johansson, and before he could read on, for some reason he saw the glass pyramid in Buchanan’s coal cellar again.
Forselius was an interesting person, thought Johansson, making a note on his pad.
Born in 1907, a mathematician and clearly not a bad one: He defended his dissertation at the age of twenty-seven and was named professor at Uppsala University at only thirty-three, approximately the same time as the Germans occupied Denmark and Norway. That was also the point when he had to leave the academic world. Forselius was called up as a regular, noncommissioned officer assigned to the intelligence department at army headquarters as an analyst and code breaker. When he was discharged at the end of the war, in 1945, he was still just a sergeant. At the same time he was a legend among code breakers the world over.
What do you mean, sergeant? thought Johansson, making a new note on his pad. A Swedish sergeant who is a drinking buddy with an American major, professor of mathematics, world-renowned code breaker…
And is discharged as a sergeant? There’s something here that doesn’t add up, thought Johansson, who had done military service himself and been discharged as a master sergeant.
Late winter in Europe, 1945. A broken-winged German eagle had fallen to the ground. The United States and England and their Soviet allies were perfunctorily striking final blows from their respective positions while their strategic thinking was headed in a completely different direction. How should you position yourself for the decisive test of strength that military logic said must come soon, the struggle between the democracies of the Western world and Stalin’s dictatorship in the Soviet Union?
Late winter in Stockholm in 1945, the agents of the Western world flocking together, and here it seemed the choice had already been made, for Forselius and Buchanan and Matejko and all their associates on the right side of the field were completely at home with each other while the talk was of their great new joint concern: the powerful neighbor to the east. It’s then that things started to happen.
Clearly it was Buchanan who sounded the alarm. Despite his anglicized nickname, there was intelligence from the OSS indicating that Captain Leszek “Les” Matejko’s heart was with the Russian comrades-in-arms who would probably soon be the main enemy in the decisive test of strength between good and evil. Considering Matejko’s background and origins, and considering the overall strategic situation, it was not a simple problem they’d been presented with, and the first decision that had been made was to keep the Englishmen out of it and turn the whole thing into a purely Swedish-American operation.
Forselius got to set the trap, and he’d done it in a very cunning way, by distributing coded messages to various presumptive suspects, then trying to intercept them through the usual radio surveillance to see which way they’d gone.
The suspicions against Matejko had been strengthened, but it was far from being the case that the trap had closed on him, and there were several in their own ranks who not only expressed uncertainty but even pleaded his case. But time was starting to run short, and information came in indicating that Matejko was intending to disappear to his old homeland securely behind the Russian front. In that situation they decided to take no chances, and on the evening of March 10, 1945, an expedition embarked from the military’s secret building on Karlaplan in Stockholm to Matejko’s residence two flights up from the courtyard on Pontonjärsgatan on Kungsholmen.
The mission of the expedition was far from clear. Who had actually dispatched it was shrouded in mystery because in principle of course it concerned a suspected case of espionage, with suspicions directed against a person with diplomatic status. Considering who he was, Matejko was to be approached as carefully as the situation allowed. Try to ascertain his intentions and sympathies, in any event secure his person, and as far as possible do so by peaceful means. Whose decision this actually was, however, is not evident from Krassner’s manuscript. He doesn’t seem to have even understood the problem.
The expedition had five members, and its composition was strange, to say the least: professor and conscript Sergeant Johan Forselius and Major John C. Buchanan, both in civilian clothes; Second Lieutenant Baron Casimir von Wrede; Second Lieutenant Sir Carl Fredrick Björnstjerna; and Captain Count Adam Lewenhaupt, all three of the last-named officers in the intelligence service’s security detail, dressed in uniform and armed with service pistol model 40. The whole company rode in a gasoline-powered black 1941 Buick, Buchanan’s service car from the embassy, and it was Buchanan who drove. What the others possibly didn’t know was that he had also brought along “his only friend in life,” the American Army’s.45-caliber Colt pistol.
After fifteen minutes’ drive through a depopulated, darkened Stockholm, they arrived at Matejko’s home address on Kungsholmen, walked up, knocked on the door, and were let in. Buchanan concisely, “in his laid-back, amiable way,” recounted the reason for their visit, whereupon Matejko-Polish cavalry officer and gentleman that he was-told them to go to hell and leave him in peace. In that situation a tumult arose in the small apartment as Second Lieutenants von Wrede and Björnstjerna tried to calm Matejko down. Kicks and blows were delivered. Captain Lewenhaupt drew his service pistol and placed himself in the doorway, whereupon Matejko, clad in dressing gown and pajamas, promptly jumped out of the window from the third story straight down to the courtyard.
In contrast to the unfortunate Krassner, he escaped with a sprained foot and limped out onto the street. His pursuers took the stairs down and when they came rushing out of the entryway, the limping, swearing, and shouting Matejko had gotten a good head start in the direction of relative security up on Hantverkargatan. Then Major John C. Buchanan drew his Colt pistol, dropped to his knee on the sidewalk, gripped it with both hands, aimed, and shot him in the back.
This hadn’t lessened the confusion. They somehow dragged the still wildly swearing and now profusely bleeding Matejko into the car, forced him down in the backseat, and drove away. Wild palaver now broke out about where they should take him. Despite the fact that he seemed to be in good condition verbally, there was no doubt that Matejko was badly wounded. There were two fully equipped civilian hospitals right in the vicinity, Serafen and Sankt Erik, but for various reasons of discretion and secrecy it was decided to drive him to the naval garrison hospital out at the Waxholm Fortress.
The atmosphere in the car was also less than good. Matejko was not happy, and when they came out onto Norrtäljevägen, Captain Lewenhaupt started to express doubts about the suitability of Buchanan going along out to Waxholm. Buchanan, an officer but not a gentleman, asked him to shut up and shove it, and at approximately the same time Matejko stopped swearing, gave up the ghost, and died.
The rest of the group were quite naturally seized by a certain dejection. They stopped at the turnoff to Waxholm for a brief war council, during which they decided to drive back to town and turn over the concluding parts of the operation to Major Buchanan. Buchanan let his comrades out on Valhallavägen and continued alone with the corpse. Unclear to where, but according to his nephew and biographer, he and his colleagues at the American embassy were said to have taken care of the body “in accordance with customary routines and in an established manner.” Sounds like a normal body at sea, thought Johansson. On his pad he made note of four names in alphabetical order by last name: Björnstjerna, Forselius, Lewenhaupt, and von Wrede, and after that he called Wiklander at work.