Mordet på Olof Palme - 28 februari 1986

Private Eye on Sunday Times’ Smear of Michael Foot as KGB Agent
October 3, 2018
The media this week has been full of the news about a book about the KGB defector, Oleg Gordievsky. Gordievsky was a high-ranking KGB officer, whose father was also a KGB officer, and who had been slated to be the next chief of the Soviet spy agency and secret police. When he defected, Gordievsky brought with him whole dossiers of KGB records, which were invaluable for ending the Cold War. However, Gordievsky himself was a self-admitted liar. And one of those lies was that the former leader of the Labour party, Michael Foot, was a KGB agent codenamed ‘Comrade Boot’.

This falsehood was published in 1995 by the Times, and was promptly answered by a libel action by Foot and a cover by Private Eye sending the whole thing up. Foot won the case, and the Eye also published an article taking apart the whole story and exposing the Times’ article for the libel it was.

Now with the publication of the new biography, the Sunday Times has decided to repeat the libel again. And Private Eye has responded again with another article effectively demolishing this sorry piece of gutter journalism. The piece was published in last fortnight’s Eye for the 21 September to 4 October 2018, and entitled ‘Shooting Yourself in the Foot’, and runs

<strong>”MI6 believed Michael Foot was paid Soviet informant,” a Times front-page headline announced last Saturday. “Truth about former Labour leader emerges 23 years after he sued Sunday Times for libel.” The editor of the Times, John Witherow, also published the Sunday Times story about the former Labour leader in 1995 – and is clearly still sore about the embarrassment and ridicule it earned him.

It’s not only the editor, it’s the same story-based entirely on a claim by former double agent Oleg Gordievsky that he once saw a KGB file marked “Agent Boot”, which apparently referred to Michael Foot. The only difference is that the previous version was taken from Gordievsky’s memoirs while the latest one comes from a new biography of the spy.

According to the Times, The book “presents the first corroboration by MI6 officers of the allegations made by the Soviet defector”. No it doesn’t, at least not in the normal meaning of corroboration, ie additional proof or confirmation. In 1995 the Sunday Times reported Gordievsky’s allegation that the KGB regarded Foot as an agent of influence; now the Times says some people in MI6 thought the Russians regarded him as an agent of influence. And why did they think that? Because, er, Gordievsky had told them so. In short, not a smidgin of supporting evidence has “emerged” since Witherow last ran the story.

At the time of the earlier farrago, the Sunday Times claimed that it was “based on interviews with Gordievsky and six other former KGB officers”. But it omitted to add that only Gordievsky believed in “Agent Boot”. Although the paper claimed that the London-based KGB colonel Mikhail Lyubimov had recruited Foot, Lyubimov himself promptly denied it.

So the allegations were not made by “the KGB”, as Witherow told his readers 23 years ago and again last Saturday. They came solely from a single ex-KGB man, Gordievsky – whose unreliability was officially confirmed in May 1995, just three months after the Sunday Times splash, by the then solicitor-general Sir Derek Spencer. Speaking on behalf of the government during an appeal by Michael Smith, who had been convicted of spying for the Russians, Spencer told the Lord Chief Justice that some boasts made by Gordievsky in his memoirs were “not correct”. He described one of Gordievsky’s claims, about identifying undercover KGB agents to his British controllers, as “another exaggeration”. As the judge observed: “He must have lied to everybody at one time or another.”

With just one witness to rely one, it’s no surprise that Witherow and the Sunday Times couldn’t defend a libel action against Foot. More surprising is that the editor is now repeating even the most egregious howlers from his previous debacle. According to the 1995 story, for instance, Foot regarded Moscow as “a beacon of world peace” until 1968, when the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia brought him “down to earth with a bump” and he ceased to be a fellow-traveler. Exactly the same narrative appeared in last Saturday’s Times. From the 1940s to the 1960s, it claimed, Foot was an “agent of influence” who could be “fed pro-Soviet ideas and reproduce them in articles and speeches” – but in 1968 he became “intensely critical of Moscow in the wake of the Prague Spring”. After that, his “enthusiasm for the Soviet Union appears to have waned”.

The claim that Foot was a pro-Soviet mouthpiece until 1968 is easily disproved. As long ago as 1946, a Labour MP wrote to Tribune complaining of the “jaundiced prejudice against Russia” in Foot’s articles. In 1948, soon after becoming Tribune’s editor, he published a leader attacking left-wingers who “are still gulled by the monstrous delusion that the Russians are the friends, not the enemies, of democratic socialism”. During the Soviet blockade of Berlin, he urged the West to “drive a land passage through the Russian zone against Russian resistance and if necessary by force of arms”.

When Ian Mikardo MP resigned from Tribune’s board of directors in protest at the editor’s anti-Soviet stance, Foot was unapologetic. “The Soviet leaders … believe as a matter of theory that the end of establishing Soviet Communism wherever they can justifies any means for its attainment,” he wrote. “They believe also as a matter of theory in secrecy, censorship, dictatorship and the ruthless annihilation of the rights of individuals.” And so it went on. When the Russian tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising in 1956, Foot was quick to condemn this “hideous outrage”.

On Friday evening, February 28, 1986, Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme together with his wife Lisbeth left his apartment in the Old Town and went on the subway to the Grand cinema. At 23.20, after watching the movie, they left the cinema and, passing a couple of blocks, approached the intersection of Sveavegen and Tunnelagatan streets. The time was later, on the street, except for the three men walking in front, and one young man, shadowed on the opposite side, was empty. On Sveavegen the spouses noticed a slowly moving taxi. At this time, someone quietly crept up to them from behind and twice at close range shot in the back of Palme. Lisbet Palme rushed to the fallen spouse, but managed to notice how the gunman sharply turned away and ran along Tunnelagatan in the opposite direction. A passer-by walking on the other side of the street rushed after him with a shout, “Stop, but the murderer instantly dissolved into the dark “passageways” of the old quarter.



The investigation, led at first by Police Commissioner Hans Holmer, and then by his colleague Hans El-web, ran over 170 working versions, but … never approached the solution to the main question of the murderer. Now H. Holmer is accused of obsession with the version about the involvement in the killing of members of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. A year after the night murder of the prime minister, police arrested twenty Kurds suspected of murder, but were soon forced to release them for lack of evidence.


Questions, questions …

Before leaving for the cinema, Palma called his son and warned that there would be no two hours. The son asked if his father would be guarded, since he intended to walk. The father “reassured” his son that there would be no protection – he let her go.

The first protocol at the site of the assassination was a female policeman in the light of a flashlight. Perhaps it was not composed professionally, in a hurry – after all, not one of the viewers who watched the movie together with the Palme couple was interviewed! – but also about him the investigation team remembered only in … 1997!


The cordon around the place of the murder was made unreliable, and hundreds of curious Stockholmers, who had fled there in the morning, stepped over the barrier tape and destroyed the last traces of the criminal. The police did not block the exits from Stockholm and did not expose any cordon at the station and at the airport.

The most important testimonies the investigation received, perhaps, from Lisbeth Palme. She described the appearance of the murderer in more or less detail: it was a middle-aged man, of inexpressive appearance, dressed in a dark cloak with a raised collar and a dark knitted hat. According to her description, a sketch was made.

The police showed two bullets found at the scene of the crime, which means that not all of her employees reacted so negligently to the investigation. Representatives of the press, who first saw the find, were here, too, astonished. The police showed them two completely bullets! How could this happen that bullets, passing through the human body, remained unharmed, without getting a dent or a scratch?

The police claimed that this was due to the fact that the bullets were armor-piercing, and therefore not deformed.

Ulf Lingerde, who carefully analyzed all the facts connected with the investigation of the murder of Palme, came to the conclusion that someone specially takes the investigators aside, directing them along the wrong path. Who is this?

So it turned out that the author and initiator of the ridiculous Kurdish version was SEPO – the Swedish security and counterintelligence service. Meanwhile, SEPO had a recording of an overheard telephone conversation, which threatened to kill Palme, but did not draw any conclusions from this. And it is not surprising, because the chief of the SEPO, by this time reached the point that he began to suspect his prime minister that he was a threat to the security of the country, and therefore refused to introduce him to secret documents, including the record mentioned telephone conversation.


It is known that Olof Palme was a consistent opponent of apartheid in South Africa and actively supported the opposition ANC, headed by N. Mandela, to the South African government. Speculating on this fact, the English weekly “New Statesman” published an article in which it was alleged that a group of West German businessmen connected with South Africa had contacted former mercenaries in search of a suitable killer, Palme. Swedish investigators immediately began to peck at this story. They unearthed in the gigantic investigation dossier on the case of Palme the protocol of the interrogation of Williamson, but he rejected all the charges and was released. Then the murder of Palme “attracted” another agent of the special services of South Africa, but this did not bring the investigation to the direct road,


… April 18, 1997 at the US airport in Houston at the customs counter a queue was formed. The third from the counter was a middle-aged man, wearing a denim suit and a hat that had a kind of hat with small fields. They were journalist Allan Frankovich, who flew to Texas to meet with his informant, a former CIA official. A. Frankovich recently specialized in making films about questionable top secret CIA operations. In the process of working on the film, the journalist unexpectedly left on the trail of the murderer of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme! The murder of the Swede was the final chord of the CIA operation code-named “Tree”, and the chief forester who raised him was none other than the head of the CIA, William Colby, who headed the CIA office in Stockholm in the 1940s. Here he has a well-established agent network,

In Houston, A. Frankovich received from his informant documents confirming the involvement of the CIA in the murder of Palme, including the photo and address of the killer. A few seconds before he approached the customs counter, Frankovitch felt unwell, staggered and, trying to lean on the counter, held out his hand to her, but could not resist and fell, knocking the woman standing behind him.

The ambulance arrived instantly. Doctors stated death from a heart attack, although admitted that “the picture is not very typical.” If you know what the journalist was doing and what he had with him, you can make an unambiguous conclusion that he was killed.

The idea of ​​eliminating Palme originated in the head of the “lumberjacks” from Langley at the very moment when the Swedish premier was going to pay a visit to the “evil empire” – to the Soviet Union. During the preparation of the visit to Moscow, W. Palme made a secret document, in which he outlined the theses concerning Sweden’s position on the transformation of the Baltic Sea into a nuclear-free zone.

Palme did not hide his dislike of US imperialism when he demonstrated against Vietnam. The whole world went around the picture of the anti-American demonstration in front of the US Embassy in Stockholm, in the forefront of which was the Swedish Prime Minister. The cup of patience of NATO strategists was filled with information that Palme favored the closure of NATO electronic tracking stations on the northern flank – in Sweden (Muskieu and Karyksfon) and in Denmark (in the Skagerrak Strait). Palme was viewed as a kind of “agent of influence” of the KGB (it is not excluded that this view of NATO began to prevail not without the participation of the traitor O. Gordlevsky, who, in addition to the Swede, to the KGB agents, includes Finnish President W. Kekkonen, Israeli Prime Minister G Meir, Chancellor of Germany V. Brandt).

A. Franković did not have time to make a film about the murder of Palme, The journalist convincingly showed that the strange behavior of Commissioner H. Holmer, who led the investigation the first year after the murder of Palme, is explained by very prosaic reasons. X. Holmer was part of the secretive organization of NATO, the so-called SOPS, which includes representatives of the special services of the countries of this alliance. Sweden is not a member of NATO, but it never left any doubt as to who will be on the side of the conflict between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. So it was always with all the leaders, and only Olof Palme tried to bring Sweden to the position of equidistance from the opposing blocs,

SOPS created in Sweden a fictitious firm “Porgeze”, through which hundreds of thousands of dollars flowed into the country for the needs of “Swedish friends”. The executor of the operation for the precautionary purpose was a foreigner who was formally not associated with the Swedish ultra-right circles. Representatives of NATO special services in Wiltshire stopped at a former CIA agent, a sniper, who became a hired killer after being trained in the secret guard of the Iranian Shah “Savak”. The French magazine Evenman du Jedi also claims that the CIA agent had a duplicate associated with the Italian Masonic lodge P-2, which was known in the recent past. When investigating the subversive activities of the lodges, Italian intelligence agencies came across a strange document: the Master of the Lico Gelli box in a telegram to one of the American members of the lodge Philip Guarino reported that “the Swedish tree will soon fall.”

Everything became clear 72 hours after sending the telegram. Three days later, Olof Palme was killed.

At the end of the letter, Litcho Jelly asked his American friend to report “this to our friend Bush”.

Who of the hired killers – American or Italian – killed the Swedish prime minister, in general, it is not very important. The fact is that the CIA, which was carrying out plans to eliminate politically disagreeable politicians (to take at least F. Castro), did this dirty and black matter, and at the same time removed the “small fry” Frankovich.

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