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Book review of Fran Borjan Tel Slutet: En Spions Memoarer by Stig Wennerstrom
GRU, spotting and recruiting of Stig Wennerstrom,
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CIA HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM |
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RELEASE IN FULL |
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2 JULY 96 |
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UNCLASSIFIED
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| FRAN BORJAN TIL SLUTET: EN SPIONS MEMOARER. By Stig Wennerstrom. (Bonniers, Stockholm, 1972.) |
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| Stig Wennerstrom notes in his memoirs (From Beginning to End) that as a boy he aspired to be a dentist. However, he relates, his fingers were too short and his hands too clumsy; family tradition prevailed and like his father, an uncle, and a grandfather, he became a military officer. In mid-career his fingers became among the stickiest in the annals of espionage; his hands smoothly passed many a roll of film in supposedly innocuous handshakes. |
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| When arrested in Stockholm in June 1963, Wennerstrom, then 57, had been an agent of the GRU for almost fifteen years. Successive assignments in Moscow and Washington as Swedish air attache, and in Stockholm as a staff officer at Defense Headquarters and as disarmament consultant to the Swedish Foreign Ministry gave him broad access to sensitive information. Energetically and imaginatively, he used that access to conduct military, scientific, and technical espionage against the United States, and to betray to the Soviets details of the Swedish air and other defense systems which had just been upgraded at high cost. |
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| Charged with "gross espionage," Colonel Wennerstrom was sentenced in June 1964 to life imprisonment and a heavy fine. During his pre-trial interrogations he became voluble and cooperative intermittently before ceasing to talk (too soon to permit a separation of all fact from fancy or to get all the facts). As the story unfolded, supplemented by investigations on both sides of the Atlantic, the quantity and quality of the intelligence he had acquired for the Soviets, especially on advanced weapons systems and military research and development, became evident. Equally apparent was the professional skill of the GRU in assessing, recruiting, manipulating, and handling Wennerstrom. |
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| Wennerstrom was a somewhat stiff, gentlemanly individual, a devoted family man without apparent vices, correct in behavior, conscious of rank and status, who had studied Russian in Riga in 1933 as a young officer and had served in 1940-41 as air attache in Moscow. The accreditation lasted long enough thereafter to place him in official and social contact with the Soviet representation in Stockholm, so that the Soviets had had a good look at him by the time he arrived in Moscow in 1949 for his second posting there. What they had found was a man deficient in loyalties, whose pride and vanity had been wounded when he was informed in 1948 that his performance as a pilot and in command had not been sufficiently promising to warrant future promotion to higher command. Moreover, he liked and excelled in languages, clearly savored the taste he had had of international and diplomatic life, considered Sweden and the Swedish defense and intelligence establishment to be small potatoes, and had had sufficient brushes with the intelligence business to develop an overweening fascination with it. He arrived in Moscow having already accepted from the Soviet attache in Stockholm a contact plan and 5,000 crowns for having placed a pencilled dot on a map to denote the location of a Swedish military airfield. The full recruitment which followed shortly after his arrival on post was neither surprising nor difficult. Wennerstrom initially rationalized his ready agreement to cooperate with the Soviets as a clever move to penetrate Soviet intelligence; the only trouble was that he never told anyone on the Swedish side about it. |
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Posted: May 08, 2007 08:43 AM
Last Updated: May 08, 2007 08:43 AM
Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:43 AM
