page_title: Swedish Security Service
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Swedish Security Service / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Stig Wennerström (1906-2006), Colonel in the Swedish Air Force who was convicted of treason in 1964. (Photo c. 1960)
context_page_description: The Swedish Security Service is a Swedish government agency organised under the Ministry of Justice. It operates like a security agency responsible for counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, as well as the protection of dignitaries and the constitution. The Swedish Security Service is also tasked with investigating crimes against national security and terrorist crimes. Its main mission, however, is to prevent crimes, and not to investigate them. Crime prevention is to a large extent based on information acquired via contacts with the regular police force, other authorities and organisations, foreign intelligence and security services, and with the use of various intelligence gathering activities, including interrogations, telephone tapping, covert listening devices, and hidden surveillance cameras.
  The Service was, in its present form, founded in 1989, as part of the National Police Board and became an autonomous police agency on 1 January 2015. National headquarters are located at Bolstomtavägen in south-east Solna since 2014, drawing together personnel from five different locations into a single 30,000 m² HQ facility.
context_section_description: The origins of the Swedish Security Service is often linked to the establishment of a special police bureau (Polisbyrån) during the First World War in 1914, which reported directly to the General Staff, predecessor of the Office for the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. The bureau's main mission was protecting national security (e.g. counter-espionage), and its first chief was Captain Erik af Edholm. Operations shut down after the end of the war in 1918, although some intelligence activities carried on at the Stockholm police, managed by a small group of approximately ten police officers led by Chief Superintendent Eric Hallgren, who later was to become the first chief of the General Security Service (Allmänna säkerhetstjänsten). Operations were mainly focused on monitoring communists from the start of the war until the early 1930s, when the service also began to focus on Nazis.
  In 1932, operations were transferred to the newly formed State Police (statspolisen). The group of officers working at the State Police did not have the means to monitor phone calls or to intercept and open mail. This, and the general lack of staff and financial resources worried the chief of Sweden's military intelligence, Lieutenant-Colonel Carlos Adlercreutz, who felt the country needed a more powerful security agency if Europe once again ended up in war. Thus, in 1938 the General Security Service was formed, following an initiative by Adlercreutz and Ernst Leche at the Ministry of Justice, among others. The entire organisation and its activities were top-secret. During the Second World War the agency monitored about 25,000 phone calls and intercepted over 200,000 letters every week. In 1946, following a post-war parliamentary evaluation, operations were significantly reduced and once again organised under the State Police, mainly tasked with counter-espionage. In 1965, the Swedish police was nationalized, and all work was organised under the National Police Board in the Department of Security (Rikspolisstyrelsens säkerhetsavdelning, abbreviated RPS/SÄK).
  The period between 1939 and 1945 was marked with extensive foreign intelligence activity in Sweden, resulting in the arrest of numerous spies and enemy agents. Some of the most notorious post-war spies are Fritiof Enbom, Hilding Andersson, Stig Wennerström and Stig Bergling. In all of these cases the spying was done on behalf of the Soviet Union and the spies were convicted to life in prison.
  In the early 1970s, Sweden was rocked by a number of terrorist acts perpetrated by Croatian separatists. Some of the most significant cases were the 1971 Yugoslavian embassy attack in Stockholm and the hijacking of Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 130 a year later. The inception of the first Terrorist Act in 1973 was an immediate policy upshot of this, which among other things gave the police the right to deport people affiliated with terrorist organisations without delay. These incidents also led to internal changes within the Department of Security, which received more resources. On 28 February 1986, Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated by an unknown gunman. The Department was not widely criticized, partly because Palme himself had declined protection on the night of the murder. It nevertheless sparked the resignation of the National Police Commissioner Nils Erik Åhmansson and the head of the Department, Sune Sandström, following the revelation of the Ebbe Carlsson affair in 1988.
  The Swedish Security Service was established on 1 October 1989, on the recommendations put forward by a Government committee tasked with evaluating the Department of Security following the assassination of Palme. The new agency was—although still formally a part of the National Police Board—more independent, with its own Director-General and political oversight also increased. Furthermore, the Service took over the formal responsibility for all close protection tasks, which was previously shared with the National Police Board and the Stockholm County Police. On 10 September 2003, Minister for Foreign Affairs Ann
caption: Stig Wennerström, convicted Soviet spy, c. 1960
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