Informationsbyrån (IB) was a secret intelligence agency without official status within the Swedish armed forces. Its main purpose was to gather information about communists and other individuals who were perceived to be a threat to the nation. It was thought that these findings were passed on to key politicians at cabinet level, most likely the defence minister at the time, Sven Andersson, and Prime Minister Olof Palme. The exposure of the agency’s operations by journalists Jan Guillou and Peter Bratt in the magazine Folket i Bild/Kulturfront in 1973 became known as the IB affair.
Carl Bildt was prime minister of Sweden between 1991 and 1994 and leader of the liberal conservative Moderate Party from 1986 to 1999.
Anna Lindh was a Swedish Social Democratic politician who served as foreign minister from 1998 until her assassination in 2003. She was considered by many as one of the leading candidates to succeed Göran Persson as leader of the Social Democrats and prime minister of Sweden. In the final weeks of her life she was intensely involved in the pro-euro campaign preceding the Swedish referendum on the euro.
Colonel Stig Wennerström of the Swedish air force was convicted of treason in 1964. During the fifties he was suspected of leaking air defence plans to the Soviets, and in 1963 he was informed upon by his maid, who had been recruited by Säpo. He was initially sentenced to life imprisonment, but his sentence was commuted to twenty years in 1973, of which he served only ten. He died in 2006. He is not to be confused with Hans-Erik Wennerström, the crooked financier who appears in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire.
In the late eighties and early nineties there was an immigration crisis in Sweden. The number of asylum seekers increased, and the resulting unemployment and backlash from local government prompted the city of Sjöbo to hold a referendum in 1998, where the population voted against accepting immigrants. The subsequent political debate, called the Sjöbo debate, led to a combined immigration and integration system in the Aliens Act of 1989.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stieg Larsson was the editor in chief of the antiracist magazine Expo, and for twenty years the graphics editor at a Swedish news agency. He was a leading expert on anti-democratic, right-wing extremist and Nazi organizations. He died in 2004, shortly after delivering the manuscripts for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle Page 178
