Margaret Thatcher told navy to raid Swedish coast

TimesOnLine.co.uk–January 27, 2008
Pelle Neroth

MARGARET THATCHER ordered the Royal Navy to land Special Boat Service
(SBS) frogmen on the coast of Sweden from British submarines pretending
to be Soviet vessels, a new book has claimed.



The deception involved numerous incursions by British forces into
Swedish territorial waters in the 1980s and early 1990s, designed to
heighten the impression around the world of the Soviet Union as an
aggressive superpower.



Sometimes the boats landed commandos, but often their job was to fool
the Swedes by mimicking the sonar signals given off by the Soviet
vessels that stalked the same waters.



The Swedish government, neutral in the cold war, is not believed to
have known about the deceptions, which were carried out by the British
and American navies.



A Swedish parliamentary inquiry noted evidence found on the seabed of
submarine “midgets with bottom-crawling capacity of a hitherto unknown
character”.



The cold war under the Baltic is detailed in a book by Ola Tunander,
research professor at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo.



Tunander writes that there were more than 4,000 reported detections of
foreign submarines in Swedish waters in 1982-92. The West claimed the
vessels were all Soviet, probing the country’s defences. Tunander
believes many were part of a CIA-run operation by Britain and America
that continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union.



“A lot of cold war intelligence operations were failures, but this one
was a real success,” Tunander said.



He reached his conclusions after speaking to former Royal Navy
submariners and CIA officials. One British naval captain told him:
“Margaret Thatcher signed approval for every single operation.”



One of the boats used was HMS Orpheus, a submarine kitted out for SBS
operations.



Tunander said he had once sat next to a British admiral at dinner and
questioned him about the operation. He replied that it was “none of my
business”, Tunander said. “The admiral then added jokingly, ‘Don’t
people fall under buses sometimes?’ ” This weekend Sir Keith Speed,
navy minister from 1979 to 1981, was asked if the missions had
happened. He replied, “Yes,” but added: “I cannot say any more as I am
bound by the Official Secrets Act until the day I die.”



Russian and Nato submarines were involved in some of the most
aggressive clashes of the cold war as the Soviet Union examined the
potential for controlling Scandinavia. This would have allowed it to
outflank Nato armies in Germany and threaten Atlantic shipping.



The confrontation under Swedish waters came to light in 1981 when a
Soviet Whiskey class submarine ran aground in an incident called
“Whiskey on the Rocks”.



As late as 1988 Ingvar Carlsson, the Swedish prime minister, warned the
USSR: “Blood will flow. We will use all available methods . . . to sink
the submarines . . . Our borders are holy.”



A senior Swedish source said the submarine incidents had been fully
investigated and that Tunander’s claims were “completely untrue”.