In the midst of Sweden’s summer football fever, a news agency tells the story of how the national team’s goalkeeper is the product of Prime Minster Olof Palme’s decisions. In 1949, Palme married a Czech woman, Jelena Rennerova, to provide her with Swedish citizenship and a route out of the Soviet Union. Having arrived on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the marriage was dissolved and Jelena eventually formed a family in Sweden.
Her grandson is the goalkeeper Jacob Widell Zetterström. According to a sports commentator, “Sweden would never have had its first-choice goalkeeper if Olof Palme hadn’t stepped up the way he did.”
It is also a charming illustration of a larger, often overlooked truth about Palme. Beneath various “bogus marriages”—to the anti-American left, tinpot dictators of the Third World, and the Russlandversteher of his time—lay a hard-nosed agenda for advancing Swedish interests and safeguarding a top-secret military cooperation with the NATO p…
