Sweet Jesus, thought Johansson as he leaned back in the desk chair to collect his thoughts. If you were to believe Krassner, it was clearly those two lunatics Forselius and Buchanan who made a secret agent out of his own prime minister.
The main character of the piece delayed his entry until the second chapter of Krassner’s manuscript, and apart from the introduction it was a section that Johansson could very well have written himself. A concise description of the prime minister’s personal background, childhood, and upbringing, which correlated with the more or less official descriptions that Johansson had studied elsewhere.
Fine background, fine family, fine upbringing, went to a fine school where he’d taken his diploma with fine grades, and all this fineness was also the very point of Krassner’s introduction. The prime minister was, namely, no common traitor to his country who only made the author “ready to vomit”; there was a deeper idea underlying Krassmer’s gastrointestinal pains as well. In contrast to common traitors who only betrayed their country-and possibly fundamental human freedoms and rights, if they came from the West and not the East-the traitor/ prime minister was playing across a considerably broader register. He had also betrayed his class, his childhood environment, his family, even done violence to his own “natural personality” and the particular “ethos” that, according to Krassner, characterized people like him-that is to say, not this prime minister in particular but rather the kind of person he would have been if he hadn’t been a traitor after all.
Johansson was content to sigh deeply over all this sordidness that supposedly characterized the country’s highest political leadership and instead, hardened as he was, leafed a few pages ahead, for now things were starting to get seriously interesting. The war ended the same month the future prime minister began his compulsory military service with the cavalry. The Germans had had enough, cremated their self-shot leader at the Chancellery compound in Berlin, and thereafter surrendered unconditionally. The victors initiated the dividing up of the European continent and an eighteen-year-old Swedish cavalryman began building his life.
First sixteen months of military basic training; out as a sergeant, fine marks, of course, and directly to the university for more academic pursuits. Scarcely two semesters later, back to the military for six months of reserve officer training, and at some point during that time one of the secret recruiters from the military intelligence service must have taken notice of him. On July 5, 1947, Professor Forselius sent a letter to his armor-bearer Buchanan. It was written on a typewriter from that era with the usual sprinkling of uneven keystrokes, individual worn-out letters, and an “a” that continually leaned to the left. A rather short letter in English, barely a page, and the introductory lines about summer drought in Stockholm and the “damn rationing” suggested that the recipient, Dear John, was already at home in the United States.
After the usual greetings and a little manly grumbling, the letter writer had quickly gotten to the point. “I’ve been thinking a great deal about our conversations concerning the intellectual aspects of our offensive in Europe, which has further confirmed our common conviction that this is a question of the utmost strategic importance, and I have come to the conclusion that we ought to proceed to practical action very soon. I also believe that I have found a person who can be of great value to us in the execution of regular field operations.”
Forselius had received a tip about the person in question from one of his contacts at the Swedish intelligence service a few months earlier, and he had used the intervening time to personally take a careful look at the person mentioned. Obviously his inspection had turned out to his great satisfaction, and the letter concluded with his warmest recommendations: “True, he’s a slender little lad, but he seems to have a hell of a big heart and a damn bravado when it really counts.”
As if this weren’t enough, he was also “highly gifted, far above the average for his fellow officers,” with “stable conservative views,” spoke “several languages fluently,” appeared to have “the exact right mental disposition for the type of work that we’ve talked about,” and in addition intended to “go to the U.S. already this autumn to study for a few semesters at an American university,” which gave them “a heaven-sent opportunity to proceed to action,” according to a very contented Forselius.
At the end of August that same year the future prime minister began his studies at a first-rate university in the Midwest, and when Professor John C. Buchanan had suddenly shown up at the same place a few months later to give a series of guest lectures on the theme “Europe after the Second World War, the politics of Soviet occupation, and the risk of a third World War,” the secret thought behind this event was sufficiently enticing for a twenty-one-year-old future politician to sign up for them.
Forselius had obviously been correct in his judgment of the prime minister’s “mental disposition,” for just before Christmas Buchanan wrote to thank him for his assistance with a successful recruitment to the CIA’s “more intellectual operations in the European field.”
“Just a few short lines to thank you for your help with Pilgrim. We had lunch last week after he’d returned from the introductory training, and I must say that he is developing in a way that exceeds even my wildest dreams.” The photocopy of the handwritten letter was found among the rest of the papers.
I see, and you got a code name too, thought Johansson, and then he interrupted his study of Krassner’s intellectual inheritance to consume a good lunch from the Christmas and New Year’s leftovers that his gingerbread-colored sister-in-law had set out. After lunch he napped for an hour, because she had forced both beer and two aquavits on him-she herself kept to mineral water-and when he woke up he took a brisk walk in the dense twilight to clear his skull before he returned to his borrowed desk. Damn, this is starting to get really exciting, thought Johansson as he stamped off the snow in the entryway to his brother’s farm office.
Late in the summer the following year, Pilgrim returned to Sweden, obviously bringing with him very fine American grades, resuming his studies at the university as well as beginning a career as a student politician that was so successful that his new employer, Sweden’s United Student Corps, chose just a few months later to send him to West Germany for an extended “study and contact trip.” Despite the fact that he was clearly “a particularly talented young man,” it was nonetheless a career that was a bit on the fast side for Lars Martin Johansson, with his more traditional police officer’s disposition, and it was Krassner who fueled his suspicions.
According to Krassner, as soon as neutral Sweden had become clear about which way things were leaning, this was the way that military cooperation with the United States had been initiated. This had also gone so far that it was now becoming possible to extend things covertly, without openly doing violence to the official position of a “continuously maintained strict Swedish neutrality.” In general this had concerned military intelligence operations directed against the traditional Swedish enemy and previous ally of the United States, the Soviet Union.
The United States provided the Swedish military with money and technical equipment while the Swedes contributed their geographic position and the personnel required for the job itself to get done. Krassner needed only a few pages to describe-mostly in passing, as it appeared-both the overall features and a number of astonishing particular events in this unofficial (to say the least) Swedish foreign policy.
A primarily defensive military cooperation, just in case. The other side of the coin was the more offensive and intellectually oriented strategy that enthused both Forselius and Buchanan along with their spiritual brethren within the Western world’s intelligence organs. For Forselius and Buchanan the underlying thought was simple and obvious and, of course, axiomatically elitist in a way to which a thinking person with stable conservative values didn’t need to give any thought.