S3E7 An Enemy Within: Cold Warriors

IN THIS EPISODE As the hot war - WW2 - ended, a "cooler" but equally fervent Cold War replaced it. The stay-behind networks described in episode one quickly became a whole subset of cold warriors. How the Cold War happened - and why - and how that set the stage for the life and death struggle that would pit old allies against each other. Walking onto that stage as Sweden's Prime Minister, Olof Palme (judging by his social class) should have been a safe bet. He was anything but. A committed socialist, Palme drove Sweden to the left - making it both prosperous and happpy. But he also wanted to negotiate with the Soviets and halt all nuclear proliferation. That made some Western leaders nervous. It made others angry enough to do something about it. Like set an assassination plot in motion. SHOW NOTES If you're enjoying Dead Drop, please check out the rest of our podcast lineup at Costard & Touchstone Productions costardandtouchstone.com. Your next podcast obsession might just be a click away! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:30Alan Katz?

  This podcast, it's a Coster and Touchstone production.

• 1:35John Kiriakou?

  January 3rd, 1947. The 80th United States Congress has just been convened. On that very same day, Representative John Parnell Thomas first gavelled the Thomas Committee into existence. The committee was tasked with investigating alleged subversive communist influence, infiltration, and propaganda within American society. The Thomas Committee had another more famous name: HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee. Thomas, a Republican, was 52 years old at the time and in the middle of serving his fifth term, representing New Jersey's 7th Congressional District. To call Thomas a staunch conservative would be an understatement.

• 2:20John Kiriakou?

  He vehemently opposed President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, claiming that FDR's progressive legislative agenda had, quote, "sabotaged the capitalist system," unquote. Thomas was especially opposed to government support for the federal theater project. Not a fan of the theater project's politics or theatrics, he insisted that practically every play presented under the auspices of the project is sheer propaganda for communism. Those were his words. In 1946, the Republican Party gained control of Congress and handed John Parnell Thomas the chairman's gavel. And Thomas focused the committee's gaze on Hollywood and especially on members of the Screen Writers Guild.

• 3:05John Kiriakou?

  It's always the writers.

• 3:06Speaker 05

  The question is, have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?

• 3:09Speaker 06

  I am framing my answer in the only way in which any American citizen can frame his answer to a question which invades his, absolutely invades his mind.

• 3:17Speaker 05

  Then you deny, you refuse to answer that question, is that correct?

• 3:21Speaker 06

  I have told you that I will, for my beliefs, my affiliations, and everything else.

• 3:25John Kiriakou?

  Thomas and his committee would ultimately zoom in on 10 members of Hollywood's creative community. They would become known as the Hollywood 10. They were screenwriters Alva Bessie, Lester Cole, Dalton Trumbull, Samuel Ornitz, Albert Muntz, John Howard Lawson, and Ring Lardner Jr. And writer-directors Herbert Bieberman and Edward Demetrick. Demetrick was the only member of the Hollywood 10 who later cooperated with HUAC. He answered their questions, naming 26 names. That was so he could return to work. The rest refused to answer the committee's questions, citing the Fifth Amendment. Thomas hit each of them with contempt of Congress charges,

• 4:07John Kiriakou?

  insisting that their refusal to talk meant that they were hiding something. Well, unfortunately for Representative Thomas, he was hiding something. As he was creating his legend, he was also padding his office payroll with no-show employees and pocketing their salaries. The columnist Drew Pearson outed Thomas in 1948. Pearson's biggest juicyest tips all coming from Thomas's own secretary. When investigators questioned Thomas about the fraud, he refused to answer any questions, and he invoked his Fifth Amendment rights, the same move that he had attacked when the accused communists did it. Irony can be so brutal, can't it? The final nail in Thomas's professional coffin

• 4:52John Kiriakou?

  was when he took the Fifth in front of a grand jury and then pleaded no contest. He resigned from Congress and was sentenced to 18 months in the minimum-security federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. But irony wasn't done with Thomas quite yet. Two of the Hollywood 10 were serving their sentences in the same prison, Chester Cole and Ring Lardner Jr. Lardner worked an indoor clerical job in the prison's Office of Classification and Parole. Thomas, by contrast, had been assigned as the custodian of the prison's chicken yard. Lardner crossed paths with Thomas in the prison quad. But Lardner wrote later, "We did not speak.

• 5:36John Kiriakou?

  How could either of us pick up where we had left off?" Chester Cole, on the other hand, had no problem picking up where he had left off with Thomas. He said later that he confronted Thomas, who looked hot, unhappy, and miserable. Quote, "Still pushing the shit around?" unquote. That's what Cole asked him. Cole didn't report Thomas's answer, though. Thomas had every reason to be miserable. The other inmates had given him a very well-deserved nickname: Congressman Chicken Shit.

• 6:09John Kiriakou?

  Welcome to Dead Drop. I'm John Kiriakou, and this is part two of An Enemy Within, our deep dive into the story behind the murder of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme in 1986. As always, thank you. Thank you for listening and for making us part of your podcasting experience. To begin to understand the compelling, all-consuming threat that Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme posed to those on Europe's far-right wing, we have to go back more than 100 years, to Paris.

• 6:41John Kiriakou?

  It's March 18th, 1871. Two months before, in January, France had suffered a massive, humiliating defeat, surrendering to Germany to end the Franco-Prussian War and to plant the seeds for World War I. During the German siege of Paris, starting in September 1870, while the French National Guard defended the city, a working-class radicalism began to grow among its soldiers. France's Second Republic ended with a surrender. When Adolphe Thiers declared the French Third Republic, soldiers of the French National Guard seized control of Paris on March 18th and refused to recognize the republic's authority. During the German siege of Paris that had preceded the surrender,

• 7:25John Kiriakou?

  the National Guard, which had been in Paris, tasked with defending it from the Germans, found themselves deeply influenced by the working-class Parisians they were protecting. A kind of working-class radicalism grew among the soldiers. Seizing the city, the Communards would govern Paris for two months, promoting progressive, anti-religious policies like the separation of church and state, self-policing, the remission of rent, the abolition of child labor, and the right of employees to take over an enterprise deserted by its owner. The commune closed all Catholic churches and schools in Paris. All kinds of ideas got into the conversation: feminism, communism, anarchism. In the two months they had to try and achieve their heady goals,

• 8:10John Kiriakou?

  the commune veered toward implementing a kind of old-style social democracy. In May, though, soldiers loyal to the Third Republic battled their way past the barricades and into the city, crushing the revolt. As revolutions do in France, this one ended bloody. The national forces killed in battle were executed between 10,000 and 15,000 Communards. And the fear of what the Communards had done, what they stood for, began to take root. As in America today, and in most places, rural populations tended to be more conservative and more religious. In France, the progressive populations of Paris and cities like Marseille and Lyon tended toward progressivism.

• 8:55John Kiriakou?

  What the Communards had done, more importantly, how they thought, well, that terrified French conservatives to their core. That terror spread far beyond Paris and really the remainder of France. In America, tensions that had been brewing since the Civil War ended between workers and ownership literally exploded at a labor demonstration on May 4th, 1886, at Chicago's Haymarket Square. The rally began peacefully in support of workers striking for an eight-hour workday, an idea that was revolutionary at the time. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police as they acted to disperse the crowd. The bomb blast and ensuing retaliatory gunfire

• 9:38John Kiriakou?

  killed seven policemen and at least four civilians. Dozens of others were also wounded. In the ensuing sledgehammer application of justice, Chicago police finally settled on eight anarchists whom they charged with the bombing. The evidence put forward at trial said that one of the defendants may have built the bomb. None on trial had thrown the bomb, and only two of the eight were actually at the Haymarket at the time of the bomb. Despite this lack of any evidence, a jury convicted all eight of them. Seven were sentenced to death and one to a term of 15 years in prison.

• 10:19John Kiriakou?

  Illinois Governor Richard J. Oglesby commuted two of the sentences to life without parole. Another died by suicide in prison before his scheduled execution took place. Four were hanged on November 11th, 1887. And in 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Atgeld pardoned the remaining defendants and criticized the trial. American industrialists, church leaders, and press outlets began framing labor radicalism as an alien conspiracy threatening private property. In 1917, as Russia's royal family teetered on collapse, the Bolsheviks revolted, eventually seized control of Russia, and transformed communism from a theory into a state power

• 11:04John Kiriakou?

  committed to global revolution. Communism's promise to empower the worker at the expense of those driving the industrial revolution made a compelling argument to plenty of working people beyond Russia. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, labor unrest spread across America. The crisis peaking in the spring and summer of 1919, something called the Red Summer, when Italian-American anarchists sent dozens of package bombs to prominent politicians, judges, and industrialists, including America's then Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. The front of his house in Washington, DC was actually blown up, and it was only because of a miracle that his family wasn't at home at the time.

• 11:47John Kiriakou?

  Even after the violence subsided, the fear of Reds and anything that smacked of their way of thinking grew. Opponents of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal branded progressive programs like Social Security as "the welfare state" and labor unions as "communist infiltrators." During the Second World War, of course, America and Democratic Europe allied with the Communist Soviet Union, but the match never lost its shotgun wedding flavor. The Americans never trusted Stalin, and Stalin never trusted the Americans. No doubt Stalin still remembered America's polar bear and Siberian expeditions.

• 12:24John Kiriakou?

  In August of 1918, as World War I began to wind down, Germany would surrender on November 11th, 1918. President Woodrow Wilson sent between 8,000 and 9,000 soldiers to Vladivostok, Siberia. The major reason was to rescue the 40,000 men of the Czechoslovak Legion, who were being held up by Bolshevik forces as they attempted to travel via the Trans-Siberian Railroad to Vladivostok. Their goal: to eventually make it to the Western Front before the war ended. But there were other reasons to pit American forces against Russians. Wilson wanted to protect the military supplies and railroad rolling stock that the United

• 13:09John Kiriakou?

  States had sent to the Russian Far East in support of the Russian Empire's war efforts on the Eastern Front of World War I. America had contributed quite a lot of military supplies. At the time, Bolshevik forces in Siberia controlled only small pockets of the country. President Wilson wanted to make sure that neither Cossack marauders nor the Japanese military would take advantage of the unstable political environment along the strategic railroad line and in the resource-rich Siberian regions that straddled it. A second expedition, dubbed "The Polar Bear Expedition," landed roughly 5,000 American soldiers, almost all of whom, oddly enough, were from Michigan in Arkhangelsk, a major

• 13:53John Kiriakou?

  port city in northwestern Russia on the banks of the northern Dvina River near the White Sea. There, the Americans fought the Bolshevik forces in brutal Arctic conditions. So, although Stalin and Roosevelt were allies, technically, neither trusted the other. Stalin had spies inside Roosevelt's administration, and they gave him and the Soviets keen insights into Roosevelt's thinking. What's more, Stalin knew just how sick Roosevelt was in November 1943, when he demanded that the Allies meet in Tehran to strategize. The 18,000-mile round trip from Washington to Tehran and back to Washington took the

• 14:35John Kiriakou?

  enfeebled Roosevelt 16 days to accomplish. He had to literally travel around World War II to get there. Arriving in Tehran, Roosevelt appeared visibly sick, weak, and frail. During the night of November 28th, 1943, as the conference began, FDR suffered a sudden, severe, acute digestive attack. Rumors swirled that Roosevelt had been poisoned, but White House physician Dr. Ross McIntyre later attributed the episode and subsequent lingering symptoms to a bout of the flu or acute bronchitis. Winston Churchill also fell seriously ill, albeit on the return journey from Tehran.

• 15:19John Kiriakou?

  Although he pushed through, Roosevelt never fully recovered from the journey's effects. In December 1943, FDR developed a persistent cough, rapid weight loss, and severe, constant fatigue. In 1944, as his condition continued to decline, Roosevelt's daughter Anna pushed for an independent examination of her father. Cardiologist Dr. Howard Bruin formally diagnosed Roosevelt with severe hypertension and acute congestive heart failure, two things exacerbated by the trip to Tehran. In February, the Allied leaders met again, this time in Yalta on the Crimean Peninsula. By then, the Allies had liberated all of France and Belgium and were fighting on the

• 16:04John Kiriakou?

  Western border of Germany. In the East, Soviet forces were 40 miles from Berlin, having already pushed back the Germans from Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. The Allies would meet in Yalta because Germany's defeat was no longer in doubt. It was going to happen. The issue now on the table was the new shape of post-war Europe. Roosevelt hoped that personal diplomacy would bring ideological divides at Yalta, but critics later argued that he conceded too much structural control of Eastern Europe to Stalin. Remember, Roosevelt was sick, and he was exhausted. Churchill and Roosevelt pushed for democratic governments and recognized Polish leadership

• 16:44John Kiriakou?

  in exile, but Stalin demanded that Poland have a pro-Soviet communist regime running it. That was better for Stalin's national security, never mind Poland's. The three leaders ultimately settled on a weak compromise: a reorganized provisional government and promises of free elections, which, surprise, surprise, Stalin never honored. Roosevelt desperately wanted Soviet military assistance against Japan, fearing the costs, human and otherwise, of a mainland invasion. Stalin agreed to enter the war against Japan 90 days after Germany's defeat, but in exchange, he wanted and he received major territorial and economic concessions in Asia, including

• 17:27John Kiriakou?

  control over the Kuril Islands and rights in Manchuria. And finally, the big three—Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill—divided Germany and Berlin into four occupation zones, including one for France. In time, Stalin would put an actual wall through Berlin to keep the West at bay. As the hot war slipped into history, a Cold War replaced it. In February 1946, while giving what was supposed to be a routine election speech in Moscow, Stalin described the World War the Soviet Union had just fought as what he called "the inevitable result of monopoly capitalism."

• 18:09John Kiriakou?

  "Monopoly capitalism," he said, "would keep producing crises and wars into the future." He then called for a new five-year plan and more years of heavy industrial buildup. Instead of a routine speech between communists, Washington heard a clear declaration that the Soviet Union's wartime alliance with the West was over. The Soviets, per the American take, were arming for what would come next. What, the Americans needed to know, was coming next. The question landed in the lap of George F. Kennan. He was a 42-year-old diplomat, then serving as a temporary guy in charge of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

• 18:54John Kiriakou?

  He was the department's top Soviet expert. Two weeks after Stalin's speech, Kennan sent an analysis, a long cable, several thousand words long, that became known as "The Long Telegram." Kennan's message was like a two-by-four upside the head of America's leadership. Soviet leaders were "committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi." But Kennan didn't predict war. Rather, he advised, "While Soviet power was 'impervious to logic of reason,' it was also highly sensitive to logic of force."

• 19:36John Kiriakou?

  "Push back firmly against the Soviets," Kennan advised, "and they will almost always retreat." Put more broadly, if the adversary has sufficient force and makes clear its readiness to use that force, he rarely has to do so. Welcome to containment. Less than two weeks later, the argument went public. Winston Churchill, who was no longer Prime Minister, stood in a college gym in Fulton, Missouri, President Truman sharing the stage with him. Churchill must have been feeling extra quotable that day because he said something that has become a part of the lexicon of the Western world. First, he said—

• 20:17Speaker 05

  From Stepin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended

• 20:26John Kiriakou?

  Iron Curtain. That was a good one. He should have copyrighted it. It was in that same speech that Churchill called for a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and the Empire and the United States. And a special relationship it was until very recently. Meanwhile, the Soviets continued pushing at the edges. Under a 1943 agreement, their troops were supposed to leave northern Iran, but they stayed. Moscow wanted Iranian oil concessions while at the same time actively backing Iranian separatists in Iranian Azerbaijan. The Soviets also leaned on Turkey for bases and transit rights through the Turkish Straits.

• 21:11John Kiriakou?

  In June of that year, the Soviets rejected the Baruk Plan, the U.S. Proposal for International Control of Atomic Weapons. Each episode reconfirmed the same lesson. When dealing with the Soviets, you have to hold firm. But life in the post-war economy was putting Britain deep in the Hurt Locker. Unable to afford to keep Soviet expansion at bay, the Brits told Washington that as of March 31, 1947, they would stop all military and economic aid to the Greek government, which was at the moment fighting a civil war against Greek communists. Turkey also depended on the significant British largesse that it was about to lose.

• 21:53John Kiriakou?

  Thus motivated, Truman went before a joint session of Congress wanting to, quote, "scare the hell out of them," unquote. He demanded that Congress pony up $400 million for Greece and Turkey, the first application of what became known as the Truman Doctrine. Scaring the hell out of Congress, which was not hard to do, especially in the aftermath of World War II, would be the go-to strategy to secure anti-communist funding for the next 40 years. If there was any kind of official start to the Cold War, many historians would point to this moment. America's active ideological fight with communism was on. Things escalated quickly.

• 22:37John Kiriakou?

  Just nine days later, Truman signed Executive Order 9835, the Loyalty Order. It created the first general loyalty program for federal employees, meant to root out any and all communist influence in or around the U.S. Government. Loyalty was one tool on the government's tool belt. Money was another. On June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall delivered the commencement speech at Harvard University's graduation. In that speech, Marshall proposed rebuilding Europe in a grand, sweeping diplomatic and economic statement. The Marshall Plan, as it would come to be known, was aimed not, quote, "against any

• 23:20John Kiriakou?

  country or doctrine," but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos, unquote. The Plan's architects understood that a rebuilt Europe would be good not only for Europe, but for the United States too. Technically, that same recovery offer was open to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, but Stalin refused. He was worried about American economic influence over his satellite states. America would go on to spend $13 billion, but only on Western Europe, which thrived while the Soviet Union struggled. Marshall became the only general ever to win a Nobel Peace Prize. In America, fear of communism and communist influence was starting to flood the zone.

• 24:04John Kiriakou?

  In October 1947, the House Un-American Activities Committee, led by Representative John Parnell Thomas, was punishing the Hollywood Ten for refusing to answer questions. Back in Europe, the rift between East and West grew wider and more violent. In 1948, Czechoslovakia's Soviet-backed Communist Party took full control of the government. The coup alarmed Western countries and helped to speed up implementation of the Marshall Plan, the creation of a West German state, and new military alliances. On March 17, Britain, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg signed the Brussels Treaty, a pact for collective self-defense. This was the first step toward creating NATO.

• 24:48John Kiriakou?

  The West tensing defensively made Moscow tense defensively even harder. When the West introduced a new currency, the Deutschmark, to replace the old currency in the German occupation zones, Moscow saw it as a clear step toward creating a separate West German state. That prompted the Soviets to cut off all rail and road access to West Berlin, and that prompted the West to then launch the largest air operation in history, the Berlin Airlift. Ich bin ein Berliner, that came a little bit later. The Western Allies remained in place. In 1948, Yugoslavia broke away.

• 25:28John Kiriakou?

  The Soviet Common Form condemned Yosef Broz Tito, Yugoslavia's leader, for straying from Marxism-Leninism. This was the first crack in the Soviet bloc. In order to dissuade others from straying, Stalin tightened his grip on Eastern Europe. In 1949, Moscow created Comic-Con, the Soviet Union's answer to the Marshall Plan. With Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Romania forming its economic bloc, Comic-Con built major regional infrastructure, including the Friendship Oil Pipeline and integrated electric power grids all across Eastern Europe.

• 26:07John Kiriakou?

  But the oil shocks of the 1970s, especially the 1973 global oil crisis, exposed the deep problems and inefficiencies in Comic-Con's central planning. Consequently, member states fell drastically behind Western innovations. Comic-Con's members had to rely on outdated machinery, and since they had to buy everything with cash, invariably U.S. Dollars, they began accumulating heavy, hard currency debts owed to Western banks. What made it worse? Comic-Con relied on non-convertible currencies, the transferable ruble, and bilateral barter deals, rather than on real market prices. That discouraged both quality and innovation.

• 26:51John Kiriakou?

  On April 4, 1949, NATO officially came into being. A little more than a month later, the Basic Law was adopted, which created West Germany's Federal Republic. And then on August 29, 1949, the Soviets tested their first atomic bomb, known as Joe One. With its detonation, more than a few atoms got blown apart. So did America's feeling of invulnerability. That bomb came years earlier than most U.S. officials thought possible. It's John. I'm on the road a lot, which usually means I have a nice pair of khakis inside my suitcase. It's in my suitcase because, frankly, they're great pants.

• 27:35John Kiriakou?

  They're the softest, most comfortable khakis I've ever owned, and they've got pockets all over the place, which I actually use. Ellen, you, on the other hand, work pretty much from home.

• 27:45Alan Katz?

  I do, which means I get to keep it super cash with a steady rotation of Quince t-shirts that feel good to wear and my growing collection of 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters that feel even better. And then there's my hoodie sweatshirt. It's so unbelievably soft, it feels indulgent. Every time I put it on, I think, everyone should have one of these.

• 28:06John Kiriakou?

  Well, it's a good thing Christmas is coming.

• 28:07Alan Katz?

  It's a good thing.

• 28:09John Kiriakou?

  That's both our shopping lists simplified.

• 28:12Alan Katz?

  Quince makes finding something great for everyone easy because they focus on high-quality staples made with premium materials like my Mongolian cashmere sweater, or 14-karat gold, or Italian leather.

• 28:24John Kiriakou?

  That makes them timeless, versatile gifts that can feel special even to unwrap.

• 28:29Alan Katz?

  Talk about high-quality bang for your gift-given buck. That cashmere sweater we keep talking about starts at just 60 bucks.

• 28:36John Kiriakou?

  Mm-hmm, and Quince's lineup doesn't stop there. Winter's already here in some places.

• 28:41Alan Katz?

  Ding, gift idea.

• 28:43John Kiriakou?

  Everything you and your loved ones need to stay warm while looking put together all season long, from premium down jackets, wool outerwear, and cashmere accessories, Quince has them all.

• 28:53Alan Katz?

  All priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands.

• 28:57John Kiriakou?

  Quince does that by working directly with ethical factories and cutting out those pointless, expensive middlemen. That way, you can give luxury without paying the luxury price tag.

• 29:08Alan Katz?

  And clothing is just the start of it. Quince has fine jewelry, leather bags, hotel-quality bedding, chef-grade cookware, and five-star luggage. I love having choices, and Quince gives me plenty of ways to find something special for everyone on this year's list. Now the question is, what should I get for John?

• 29:25John Kiriakou?

  If it's from Quince, I'm sure I'll love it, whatever it is. Give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns, now available in Canada and the U.K. too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was dead drop. It's the best way to support the show.

• 29:52Speaker 07

  Get under a blanket and get comfy. This message is sponsored by ADT. It's back to school, back to work, back to cozy nights at home season, and ADT is here for every moment of it. They handle your home security so you can focus on spending time with the people who matter. They make it easy with professionally-installed systems you can access right from the ADT Plus app. If you need help, their reps are on-call 24/7 at the most company-operated monitoring centers in the industry. You deserve some cozy back-to-home time. ADT will keep an eye out. When every second counts, count on ADT. Visit ADT.com today.

• 30:36John Kiriakou?

  If you're enjoying Dead Drop, and of course, we hope you are, then while you're waiting for new episodes, I'd like to suggest another great granular story podcast from the Costard and Touchstone family. Just the Photographer with David Swanson does for photojournalism what Dead Drop does for spies. Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist David Swanson tells you stories his amazing news photos just can't. What it felt like being in all those dangerous places like war zones and natural disasters, doing his job, taking pictures. Having been to a few war zones myself, I can tell you this. Just the Photographer will put you right there, on the ground, right next to David. Inside his head, in fact. It's a hell of a podcast,

• 31:21John Kiriakou?

  and you can find it wherever you find your favorite podcasts or at costardandtouchstone.com. There's a link in this episode's show notes. In fact, you'll find lots of great story podcasts at Costard and Touchstone, like The Donor, a DNA horror story, The Hall Closet, Sage Wellness Within, and the How Not to Make a Movie podcast. Who knows? Your next favorite podcast might be just a click away. Now, back to Dead Drop.

• 31:50John Kiriakou?

  On September 23rd, Harry Truman told the public in a low-key, carefully worded statement that America no longer had the world's only nuclear arsenal. He may have wanted to tamp down an urge to panic, but panic, America would, and with tragic consequences. In Northern Europe, Sweden held extensive negotiations with Norway and Denmark to create a neutral Scandinavian defense union. Those talks failed because Norway and Denmark wanted to join the NATO alliance, while Sweden officially rejected joining NATO. Sweden wanted to preserve its non-alignment and avoid provoking the Soviet Union. And why wouldn't they? While much of the rest of Europe was struggling after the war,

• 32:35John Kiriakou?

  Sweden's forestry and mining-based economy was booming. That had inspired the country to expand its early social welfare programs. This was the world and the Sweden into which then-22-year-old Olaf Palma stepped. He had just returned home, having hitchhiked through the United States and Mexico. He was ready for the next phase of his life. But would the world, Sweden included, be ready for him?

• 33:16John Kiriakou?

  Former Swedish diplomat and businessman Jan Stoklasa sits in his Volvo outside of a rented storage facility on the outskirts of Stockholm. He awaits a contact, a man named Daniel Poole from Expo, a magazine dedicated to covering far-right, racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-democratic movements. A second car pulls up next to the Volvo. A man emerges, Daniel. He motions for Jan to follow him to the storage facility's front door. There, Daniel punches a code into the keypad and gets them inside. The two head up a staircase and down a corridor lined with sheet metal roll-up doors. The sound of their footsteps echoes along the depressing, liminal space

• 34:00John Kiriakou?

  lit by the same overly bright fluorescents that dominates the average grocery store. Daniel stops at one sheet metal door that's otherwise indistinguishable from the rest. He unlocks the padlock and opens the door. Seeing the massive collection of cardboard boxes inside, stacked on top of each other, filled to the brim with documents, newspaper clippings, and letters, Jan's eyes light up. This treasure trove is even better than he had hoped for. Daniel gives Jan strict instructions. Jan is not allowed to take any documents off the premises without his, Daniel's, permission. And he is to tell no one about the whereabouts of the location

• 34:44John Kiriakou?

  of this archive of information. Jan has no problem with any of that. His head is positively swimming right now. He knows he is now in this for the long haul. He'll have to give up all of his other work and come to this suffocatingly gray storage container every day, if necessary, to root through every last document there, a task that would make even Sisyphus groan. But Jan wouldn't have it any other way. He is beyond thrilled. Wouldn't you be thrilled to find yourself surrounded by the forgotten files of one of the world's most prolific writers of the 21st century? This storage facility was owned, while he was alive, by the Swedish writer, journalist,

• 35:28John Kiriakou?

  and far-left activist, Stig Larsson. Larsson, of course, is best known for writing the first trilogy in the Millennium series of crime novels, the first of those novels being The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Unfortunately for Larsson, he died unexpectedly of a heart attack at only 50 years old in November 2004, just months before that first book was published. So imagine, Stig Larsson died having no idea how successful a writer he was just about to become. The book and the series were incredibly popular in Sweden, and then in the UK, and then in America. Four different motion pictures have been made from that first series of books. In fact, Larsson was the second bestselling fiction author

• 36:13John Kiriakou?

  in the world in 2008 after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was published in America. He was second behind Afghan-American novelist Khalid Housseini, whose novel, The Kite Runner, was number one. Just for the record, and because it can be such a small world, I was a consultant on the film adaptation of The Kite Runner. But I digress. The third and final novel in the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, became the bestselling book in the United States in 2010. By March 2015, Stig Larsson's books had sold more than 80 million copies worldwide. But unbeknownst to most, if not all, of his millions of worldwide fans

• 36:57John Kiriakou?

  was that Larsson considered his work on the trilogy to be more of a hobby. His real passion? Getting to the bottom of who assassinated Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palma. That passion and its work product now surrounded Jan Stoklasa. Inside those boxes were some of, if not the most, detailed and thorough investigation into the Olaf Palma case. They contained more than a decade of dedicated, exhaustive detective-like journalism. Yet, as Jan looked around at the boxes in 2014, the case in question had all been forgotten. Not for long, though.

• 37:43John Kiriakou?

  What Jan found in the archive would give police new leads, new theories, and would reinvigorate the search for the person who murdered Sweden's Prime Minister in 1986. Now, while Larsson and Palma held nearly identical political positions, both were anti-racist, anti-fascist, anti-apartheid, they came to those identical positions from opposite places. Because of his family's various financial hardships, Larsson was raised mostly by his grandfather, Sven Palma, a well-known insurance director and politician who had been an anti-Nazi communist imprisoned during World War II. Larsson himself was highly active in the Swedish Trotskyite movement when he was a kid.

• 38:27John Kiriakou?

  In 1995, he co-founded the anti-racist magazine Expo. Working under constant severe death threats from violent extremist groups, Larsson had to hide his residential address and live without marrying his partner to shield her from public records. That, of course, was all pre-doxing. In his work, Larsson challenged the international perception of Sweden as a flawless socialist paradise or a dull social democratic haven. He exposed Sweden's hidden historical ties to Nazi Germany and argued that fascism never truly vanished from Sweden after World War II. In fact, in the 1990s,

• 39:10John Kiriakou?

  Larsson warned presciently that far-right extremism was shifting away from violent skinheads and toward men in suits who knew better how to run for and win mainstream elections. As for Palma, he was born in 1927 in Ostermalm, the most exclusive neighborhood in Stockholm. His family was wealthy, conservative, and Lutheran. His father was a businessman with roots in Swedish-speaking Finnish nobility. His mother was from a Baltic German family and had come to Sweden as a refugee from Russia in 1915.

• 39:52John Kiriakou?

  Palma's father died when Palma was seven years old. Because he was so sickly, Palma couldn't go to school with other children. So instead, private tutors taught him at home. One-on-one learning worked for young Palma. In short order, he became fluent in French, German, and English, as well as Swedish. Having grown out of his youthful sickliness, Palma attended an elite prep school and then spent two compulsory years in a cavalry regiment. All Swedish citizens must enlist when they turn 18. Everything about Palma's background pointed toward a career as a conservative banker or diplomat. As Palma said later of himself,

• 40:36John Kiriakou?

  "I was born into the upper class, but I belong to the labor movement." Well, with his military service behind him, Palma wanted to study in America. And so in 1947, the same year the Truman Doctrine split the world into two camps, capitalist and communist, Palma went to America, the place he would later joke that made him a socialist. His grandfather, the one who had raised him, had one hard, fast rule. Wherever Palma studied in America, it would have to be at a Protestant institution. Although he had never heard of Kenyon College in rural Ohio, that's where Palma landed.

• 41:21John Kiriakou?

  Founded in 1824 by Philander Chase, the first Episcopal bishop of Ohio, Kenyon began as an all-male Episcopal seminary and college dedicated to training Protestant clergymen for the American frontier. Palma would later tell Kenyon's Alumni Bulletin in 1984 that he'd been extremely lucky to land at Kenyon. Its politics and his meshed together quite nicely. His intellect properly peaked, Palma would later begin to adopt the radical socialist ideology that would define his political career. So, yes, America did at least help make Olaf Palma a socialist. Palma wasn't at Kenyon for very long, though.

• 42:06John Kiriakou?

  He got his bachelor's degree in one year, graduating in 1951. He put up straight A's as a poli sci and econ major and played varsity soccer. Now, smart as he was, he also walked in the door with a lot of transferable credits from his studies in Stockholm. Having graduated, Palma took his gap year and he just hitchhiked around America and Mexico on a budget of 300 bucks. Though Kenyon may have educated Palma well, that trip that year taught him way more than anything he learned at Kenyon College. He saw with his own eyes the systemic inequality and injustice

• 42:48John Kiriakou?

  that pervaded so much of American and European culture. In a 1975 article in The Collegian, Palma wrote, "It was the appalling poverty and injustices that I saw during that trip, especially in the South, that made me a socialist." Palma wrote his senior honor thesis on the United Auto Workers Union, which was led at the time by Walter Ruther. The UAW came to be known as one of the most progressive workers' unions in American history. His radical socialist views were widened even further on a trip to Asia, specifically India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Singapore,

• 43:32John Kiriakou?

  Indonesia, and Japan, where he saw firsthand the destructive consequences of colonialism and imperialism. Returning to Sweden in 1949, where we started this episode, and having seen the world and learned something from it, Palma plunged himself into politics, joining the Swedish Social Democratic Party. Brilliant and restless, he quickly made an impression. In debate, he could take an opponent apart. As I can tell you from my own experience, making a great impression can get you great results. It definitely gets you noticed by all the important players. In 1953, Social Democratic Prime Minister Taga Erlander recruited Palma to serve as his personal secretary. That's a big deal.

• 44:17John Kiriakou?

  In 1957, Palma was elected to Parliament himself. Along the way, he had evolved considerably. The young, carelessly dressed politician with an unruly cowlick had been replaced by someone who knew how he came across, especially on television, and was willing to change it. In 1963, he became a member of the cabinet, retaining his duties as a close political adviser to Prime Minister Erlander. And in 1965, he became the Minister of Communications. In 1967, he became Minister of Education and Ecclesiastical Affairs, and the following year, he became Minister of Education. In this role, he faced strong criticism

• 45:01John Kiriakou?

  from left-wing students protesting against the government's plans for university reform. That resulted in the students occupying the Student Union Building in Stockholm. Palma was becoming known for being approachable, though. Later in his political life, and we'll see this in some detail, he would duck his bodyguard because he preferred to mingle with his fellow citizens uninhibited. That affability was why he went to Stockholm to speak with the students, urging them to use democratic methods in pursuit of their cause. He would become a protester himself on the 21st of February 1968, when he participated in a protest in Stockholm against the US and its involvement in the Vietnam War.

• 45:46John Kiriakou?

  Both Palma and North Vietnamese ambassador to the Soviet Union, Nguyen To Chan, gave speeches. That's pretty dramatic. Not pleased at all, the US recalled its ambassador to Sweden. Palma was fiercely criticized by the opposition for his participation in the protest, primarily by the far right. Still, when Prime Minister Erlander stepped down the very next year in 1969, Palma won election as Sweden's Prime Minister. At the age of 42, he was the youngest person ever to do so. Palma governed aggressively. In his initial term, he expanded Sweden's pension, universal healthcare,

• 46:30John Kiriakou?

  public housing, and public education programs, giving the structure and form to craft Sweden into the contemporary welfare state that it is today. Understandably, Palma was very popular with the left. Writers and columnists used words like "revolutionary," "reformist," and "self-identified progressive" to describe him. Conservatives, though, hated him. That shouldn't be a headline or a revelation, though. In the United States, President Richard Nixon seemed to take Palma's Vietnam War protest personally. Not content with having withdrawn an ambassador, in 1970, when Palma visited the United States,

• 47:14John Kiriakou?

  Nixon pointedly did not invite him to the White House. That kind of non-reception is extremely rare. Fidel Castro got just such a non-reception during his visit to Washington in 1960. Unchastened, Palma didn't back down, though. In his 1972 Christmas speech, he put "Hanoi Christmas 1972" on a list with Guernica, Liddiche, and Treblinka as scenes of war crimes. Well, enraged, Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger talked about economic sanctions before settling on what they called a diplomatic freeze.

• 47:58John Kiriakou?

  Nixon refused to accept Sweden's new ambassador and was close to breaking off diplomatic relations with Sweden altogether. According to The New York Times, Nixon personally kept the freeze on Sweden longer than on any other country and turned down every Swedish attempt to repair relations. But at home, Palma continued to enjoy his people's support as he remade the government.

• 48:25Speaker 00

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• 50:14John Kiriakou?

  In his first term, Palma instituted several major reforms. In 1971, he orchestrated the switch from bicameralism to unicameralism. This helped to really streamline government. The American equivalent would be going from having a house and a senate to having just one legislative body consisting of both of them. In 1975, Palma replaced the 1809 Instrument of Government, one of the oldest political institutions in the world, with a new one, officially establishing Sweden as a parliamentary democracy, replacing its de jour monarchic autocracy. Going even further, Palma abolished the cabinet meetings chaired by the king,

• 50:56John Kiriakou?

  thereby stripping Sweden’s monarch of all formal political power. And still, there was more. Palma reformed the labor market, establishing a law that increased job security. He also increased tax rates to fund social services, creating tax rates that would end up the highest in the Western world. Under Palma, childcare centers, social security, protection of the elderly, accident safety, and housing problems were all top priorities. He gave special attention to the public health rating, lowering the infant mortality rate to 12 per 1,000 births. He instituted an ambitious redistributive program,

• 51:38John Kiriakou?

  giving special help to the disabled, immigrants, the low-paid, single-parent families, and the elderly. Sweden’s pension rate was increased from 42% to 57%. Health services increased the minimum replacement rate from 64% to 90% of earnings. In 1974, Sweden established supplementary unemployment assistance along with universal dental insurance. Also in 1974, housing allowances for families and children were raised and extended to other low-income groups. And I’m not done yet. Palma introduced reforms to the field of education as a system of loans and benefits for students,

• 52:22John Kiriakou?

  regional universities, and preschool for all children. In 1975, he introduced a law that established free admission to universities. The Employment Protection Act of 1974 introduced rules regarding consultation with unions, notice periods, and grounds for dismissal. It authorized grants to improve work environments, standardizing safety stewards to review the introduction of new technology in regard to the health and safety of workers. To stimulate the economy and raise money for the increase in social services, Palma pursued what he called “a third way” that did not rely on Keynesian economics or on a budget deficit.

• 53:04John Kiriakou?

  Instead, he implemented something called “equality of sacrifice.” Wage restraints would be accompanied by increases in welfare provision along with more progressive taxation. This included a tax on wealth, gifts, and inheritance. Tax benefits to shareholders were either reduced or completely eliminated. Palma was an outspoken supporter of gender equality. He took a hard-line stance on green politics, championing nuclear energy over fossil fuels. Sweden’s 1980 referendum on the future of nuclear power is credited with saving it and paving the way for Sweden’s continued reliance on nuclear energy for clean energy. America wasn’t the only superpower in Palma’s crosshairs.

• 53:49John Kiriakou?

  Although he was entirely open to working with the Soviet Union, he vehemently opposed their crushing the Prague Spring in 1968, when Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia. He criticized the Franco regime in Spain, calling it “a regime of goddamn murderers,” which was true. He denounced apartheid in South Africa, referring to it as “a particularly gruesome system.” He supported the ANC, the African National Congress, politically and financially. And he also supported the Palestine Liberation Organization, the PLO. In 1975, he visited Fidel Castro’s Cuba and denounced Fulenziio Batista’s government,

• 54:33John Kiriakou?

  praising contemporary Cuban revolutionaries. He was a strong critic of the Pinochet regime in Chile, and he politically and financially supported the FMLN, FDR in El Salvador, and the FSLN in Nicaragua. And to top it all off, Palma campaigned against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Perhaps the clearest indicator of Palma’s feelings about the sense of injustice that motivated him came during a 1972 speech that he made on Swedish national radio. America was still at war with and in North Vietnam. From May to December 1972, the United States relentlessly bombed Hanoi ostensibly to force them back to the negotiating table.

• 55:18John Kiriakou?

  The heaviest bombing in December killed somewhere between 1,600 and 2,300 people, depending on which estimate you accept. The death toll likely would have been far higher had North Vietnamese authorities not preemptively evacuated nearly 500,000 residents from the center of the city of Hanoi before the heavy bombers arrived. Palma compared the ongoing US bombing of Hanoi to historical atrocities like the bombing of Guernica, the massacres of Orador Suruglan, Babi Yar, Katyn, Ledeche, and Sharpville, and the extermination of Jews and other groups at Treblinka. Richard Nixon, thin-skinned to begin with,

• 56:02John Kiriakou?

  called the comparison “a gross insult,” and once again froze America’s diplomatic relations with Sweden. This time, the freeze would last for more than a year. While Palma had close ideological allies among fellow democratic socialists like West Germany’s Willy Brandt and Austria’s Bruno Kriske, conservative and centrist leaders across Europe, they sided with Nixon. They saw Palma as reckless and polarizing. British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, a fierce champion of free-market capitalism and steadfast ally of the United States, despised Palma’s aggressive democratic socialist domestic policies and his high-tax welfare state.

• 56:45John Kiriakou?

  She viewed his anti-apartheid campaigns, his vocal support for Marxist liberation movements in Latin America like the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and his push for a nuclear-free Europe as directly undermining Western security. Worse, in her eyes, Palma’s various plays aided the Soviet Union, she said. British friction with Palma predated Thatcher, of course. During the late 1960s, British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson was deeply uncomfortable with Palma’s radicalism. While Palma used Sweden’s neutrality to aggressively attack US foreign policy, Wilson felt constrained by Britain’s alliance with the United States.

• 57:29John Kiriakou?

  In 1967, Wilson famously blocked the anti-war Bertrand Russell International War Crimes Tribunal from being held in London. Palma immediately stepped in, authorized the tribunal, and hosted it in Stockholm, infuriating Washington and its mainstream European leaders. It probably isn’t surprising that Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, a fascist authoritarian, had issues with Palma, too. Spain and Sweden experienced open diplomatic warfare with one another. In 1975, after Franco’s regime executed several anti-fascist political prisoners, Palma gave a fierce public speech

• 58:12John Kiriakou?

  branding the Spanish government “goddamn murderers,” that ruffled more than a few feathers. Spain temporarily recalled its ambassador from Stockholm, and right-wing European factions condemned Palma for violating traditional diplomatic decorum. Good heavens, right? During the 1972 Christmas bombings of Hanoi, Palma actively tried to pressure French President Georges Pompidou and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt into issuing a joint public European condemnation of the United States. Pompidou resisted. He saw Palma’s megaphone diplomacy as destabilizing, as counterproductive to the actual peace talks that were taking place on French soil

• 58:57John Kiriakou?

  and damaging to Western Europe’s broader relationship with Washington. Meanwhile, Stieg Larsson, the author, now deeper than ever into his research of Sweden’s far-right, found himself focusing less on individuals than on Sweden’s far-right political parties and movements. Though none of the groups Larsson monitored were large, except for Nizvenka Rorrelsen, the New Swedish Movement, none of the groups ever had more than a few hundred members. Nizvenka Rorrelson, at different times in its history, had thousands of members, peaking in 1944 at nearly 9,000 members. Though each group by itself was small, collectively, they presented a host of threats. On a nearly daily basis, Larsson monitored these groups’ propaganda,

• 59:42John Kiriakou?

  tracked their evolving theories and ideological influence, and laid out when and how these groups would meet up. This even included how they received mail or messaged different cells through post office boxes. At the peak of his investigation, Larsson arguably had done more work on the subject than anyone else in the world. He had made himself a certifiable civilian expert on all things far-right. Like Larsson, Olaf Palma was at the absolute peak of his work on Sweden’s social systems. He had accomplished or was in the process of accomplishing most of what he had set out to do as a governing head of state.

• 1:00:24John Kiriakou?

  But, as we’ve described here, Palma also had an intrinsic sense of justice. That sense had been galvanized into action by what he had seen in America and Asia. Those actions, in turn, would inspire counterreactions. One would strap its purpose to a copper-tipped lead bullet, likely loaded into a Smith & Wesson 357 Magnum revolver, though the actual, primary murder weapon was famously lost. That single shot would do more than just kill one man. It would expose the bloody innards of what had secretly defined Sweden and the West during the Cold War. Clandestine networks characterized by deception, terrorism, and lies.

• 1:01:10John Kiriakou?

  For Stieg Larsson, that bullet would stamp a heart-sinking, gut-wrenching headline emblazoned across every newspaper in Europe on the morning of March 1, 1986. Palma assassinated.

• 1:01:29John Kiriakou?

  As Jan Stoklasa thumbed through Stig Larsson's forgotten investigation, he found one of the first letters Larsson wrote to Jerry Gabel, a close friend at Searchlight magazine. Searchlight is a British anti-fascist investigative magazine founded in 1975, covering far-right extremism, racism, and antisemitism globally. In that letter, Larsson wrote with absolute clarity: "The assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palma is, to be perfectly honest, one of the most unbelievable and amazing acts of homicide I have ever had the unpleasant job of covering." Larsson wasn't exaggerating, not even a little bit.

• 1:02:12John Kiriakou?

  In our next episode, we'll begin to explore the tick-tock of that amazing case of homicide. We'll talk about the coordination between players and their plays. We'll dive into the various possible shooters and those who likely helped put those shooters into position. Beneath Stockholm's picturesque, romantic facade, terrible secrets were about to erupt in violence, and nothing could stop them. Until next time, I'm John Kiriakou.

• 1:02:48John Kiriakou?

  "An Enemy Within" is written by Tristan Katz and Alan Katz. Micah Smith did the sound design and audio mix. Costard and Touchstone produced the podcast, and John Kiriakou and Alan Katz are the executive producers.

• 1:03:10Speaker 00

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• 1:03:45John Kiriakou?

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• 1:04:19Speaker 06

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