Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End: The Story of a Crime

by Leif G. W. Persson

  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.

  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.

  What would decide the future of Europe was the direction in which the young, developing elite would go in a political sense. Because the work of influencing that issue, like all other superior and essential human endeavors, was best carried on in organized forms and preferably with organized tasks and goals as well, the student movements had become both the new armies of the cold war and the field where the battle was fought.

  Against this background it wasn’t so strange that it was the American military headquarters in Frankfurt that had taken care of Pilgrim in matters both large and small when he’d finally arrived to “begin his studies” and “make his first international contacts.”

  Certainly an interesting time, thought Johansson. Pilgrim had clearly not been a bad haul. As soon as he’d gotten his feet wet he’d started running like a shuttle behind the iron curtain that had just been pulled down: East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia. International symposia, conferences, lecture tours, study visits, debates, and ordinary simple gatherings were sandwiched with secret nighttime meetings, smuggled-out messages, agents to be recruited, and sympathizers to be won over to the right cause. But also the sort of people they hadn’t been successful with, who had become suspect and uncovered, who had let them down. One or two had even disappeared or died.

  And the whole time Buchanan had held his fatherly, protective hand over his young favorite Pilgrim. They had frequent and ongoing contacts by letter and telephone and in all the customary secret ways, and all
of a sudden Buchanan might suddenly show up, nod at Pilgrim, and take him out to a restaurant regardless of whether it was in Stockholm, Frankfurt, Berlin, London, or Paris. But never in Warsaw, never in Prague, never on the wrong side of the curtain.

  An exceedingly generous father figure with almost inexhaustible resources, it appeared, if one were to believe Krassner’s writings and the documentation he’d received from his uncle. Pilgrim had been active as an agent for the CIA within the international European student movement for almost five years, from the autumn of 1948 to the summer of 1953, and during all of that time Buchanan had had his spending hat on and his wallet wide open. Among Krassner’s papers was a neat, handwritten compilation of the amounts transferred to “Pilgrim and/or Pilgrim Operations and/or Pilgrim Operatives” during the years in question: Buchanan’s handwriting, the usual type of copy, the amount of the sum, whether it was disbursed by check, postal order, or in cash, as well as the date and year of the disbursement.

  In addition to this compilation there were also twenty-some copies of both Swedish and foreign checks and postal orders that were either drawn blank or to “the holder” or “the bearer,” and none of them had been issued by the CIA or any other official, semiofficial, or covert American authority whatsoever. Instead the money came from American institutions, foundations, and not-for-profit organizations: from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, from the Beacon, Borden, Edsel, Price, and Schuhheimer foundations, most often from the last named.

  Generous guy, thought Johansson, a perception clearly shared by Krassner himself, who in one of his messy and partly handwritten footnotes had scribbled that “Bartlett K. Schuhheimer was a true American and patriot who willed his entire fortune to the fight against the red menace” at the same time as he named his “good friend and comrade-in-arms Col. John C. Buchanan to oversee and distribute the assets of the foundation.”