Keesing's Record of World Events (formerly Keesing's Contemporary Archives),
Volume 29, July, 1983 Sweden, Page 32285
© 1931-2006 Keesing's Worldwide, LLC - All Rights Reserved.
Cabinet appointment Swedish-Soviet controversy over
allegations of submarine activity
Summary and key dates
Appointment of Mr Mats Hellstrom as Minister for Foreign Trade (Jan. 11, Publication of report
on suspected presence of foreign submarines in Swedish waters (April Swedish protest to Soviet
Union over alleged violation of territorial waters (April
Mr Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, announced on Jan. 11, 1983, the expansion of his
Social Democratic Government formed in October 1982 through the appointment of Mr Mats
Hellstrom to the newly separated cabinet post of Minister for Foreign Trade.
Mr Hellstrom (40), a Social Democrat, was first elected to the Riksdag (Parliament) in 1968; he
had been a member of the Riksdag's committee on foreign affairs, and of the Swedish delegation
to the United Nations, and became chairman of the Riksdag's committee on finance in October
1982.
Following the unsuccessful Swedish search for a suspected foreign submarine in Swedish
territorial waters near the Musko naval base south of Stockholm in October 1982, a five-member,
all-party submarine defence commission was set up to investigate the incident.
The commission was chaired by Mr Sven Andersson, a Social Democrat, who had been Minister
of Defence from 1957 to 1973 and Foreign Minister from 1973 to 1976.
The unanimous report of the commission, published on April 26, quoted “abundant technical and
circumstantial evidence” (including Swedish Navy photographs of imprints left on the sea-bed
by submarines near the Musko base) in support of its conclusion that the Soviet Union was
responsible for the October incident and for other submarine intrusions in 1982.
It reported that six alien submarines were “probably involved”, including three manned midget
submarines of a previously unknown type, which could “crawl” along the sea-bed by means of
caterpillar tracks. Forty incidents had been reported in 1982 (as opposed to only four in the
previous year); the October incident was seen as part of an “increasingly provocative” series of
territorial incursions, but the report noted that “no observations (had been) obtained indicating
intrusion in Swedish territorial waters by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
submarines”. The report also advocated the allocation of between 200,000,000 and 250,000,000
kronor (about US $ 26,500,000-$ 33,000,000) to improve the country's submarine defence
network.
Mr Carl De Geer, the Swedish ambassador to the Soviet Union, was temporarily recalled from
Moscow on April 26, while on the same day Mr Boris Pankin, the Soviet ambassador to Sweden,
was also summoned to the Foreign Ministry in Stockholm and handed a strong letter of protest.
The letter complained of “the gross violations of Swedish territorial integrity of which the Soviet
Navy has been guilty”, and added: “The Swedish Government request the Government of the
Soviet Union to give instructions to the Soviet Navy that violations of Swedish territory cease.”
Mr Palme indicated that official visits between the two countries would be cut back, and he said
later in an interview that the Swedish Navy's rules of engagement had been changed to permit
senior commanders to open fire at once on vessels violating territorial waters. Mr Palme also
promised that orders to sink the vessels would come promptly from Stockholm if they remained,
warning that “if a submarine and its crew are harmed, the whole responsibility will rest with the
country which is responsible for the violations”.
The following day (April an indirect Soviet rejection of the Swedish accusations came in the
form of a commentary by the Soviet news agency Tass, which maintained that the conclusions of
the commission's report were “devoid of any foundation”, and that the report gave no proof that
the submarines were Soviet.
Subsequently, on April 28, the Swedish Government further announced that it would not be
attending the May Day parade in Moscow that year, while members of the Riksdag greeted with
enthusiasm the news that a visit to Moscow by Danish Social Democrats had been cancelled in
protest at Soviet submarine violations of territorial waters.
On the same day, the Swedish Navy also began a search for what military officials suspected
were two midget Soviet submarines off the Swedish coast near Sundsvall, approximately 250
miles north of Stockholm, and, although two remote control permanent anti-submarine mines
were exploded on May 4 and a further charge was dropped on May 5, the search had to be called
off on May 10 after contact with the suspected submarines was lost. Earlier, on March 22, an
ultimately unsuccessful operation had been ordered for what defence staff said was “something
which could be a submarine” detected near the Musko base.
Likewise in Norway, unsuccessful searches were made for suspected submarines sighted on
April 27 in the Hardangerfjord and on May 2 in the Selbjoernsfjord, approximately 30 miles
south of Bergen.
The official Soviet response to Mr Palme's written protest of April 26 came on May 5 in the form
of an oral reply from Mr Pankin, in which he said the Soviet Union had been wrongly accused
and viewed with “deep displeasure” the “unfriendly behaviour” of the Swedish Government and
the anti-Soviet coverage of the question in the Swedish press. At a press conference on May 6,
this reply was rejected by Mr Palme as unacceptable, and relations between the Soviet Union and
Sweden were widely regarded as being at their lowest ebb for many years.
The issue was further complicated by Mr Palme's subsequent criticism, which was made public
on May 26, of a visit to the United States earlier in the month by Mr Carl Bildt, a Moderate
(Conservative) member of the Riksdag and of the submarine defence commission. Mr Bildt was
accused of seeing military officers and Defence Department officials, including representatives
of the intelligence community, during his stay, a move regarded as “exceptionally injudicious”
for a neutral country such as Sweden.-(Guardian Times Financial Times Daily Telegraph
International Herald Tribune Neue Zurcher Zeitung Le Monde Swedish International Press
Bureau, Stockholm BBC Summary of World Broadcasts)
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