Recently, Israel’s Haaretz ran a piece on the Swedish edition of my book The Stay Behinds in connection with the fortieth anniversary of the killing of Sweden’s prime minister Olof Palme, the backdrop being a persistent conspiracy theory among “private investigators” of the still-unsolved murder that the clandestine Swedish stay-behind organisation during the Cold War was responsible.
Some of them appear in the article, and while I welcome the fact that author Mats Deland, after reading my book, has arrived at a more nuanced understanding of the stay-behind phenomenon, others feel that I have glossed over the possibility of the Swedish resistance movement assassinating its own prime minister—since I don’t discuss it. Fringe voices go further and suggest that I have been prevented from doing so, and that I have instead left clues in the book.
What,…