In the Swedish armed forces, we were aware that university and college students were exempt from ordinary national conscription. What I, at least, had never heard was that they were forced to spend one day a week at a military faculty at their educational institution. There, they were trained in parallel to become reserve officers. In their final year they served in the military organisation, a final period of commanding troops. Those with great ability, particularly physically, were chosen for a separate Spetsnaz organisation. Sportsmen from the elite are individually named as being part of special units, reporting directly to the central command.
[61] The command of troops by those chosen for the Spetsnaz partly consisted of a couple of months as tourists in groups of two to three men in a region in the country where they were to have their wartime missions. Once there, they carried out reconnaissance on the infrastructures that were of military interest within the area. Their service could also consist of them accompanying so-called TIR vehicles and merchant or fishing vessels which were to pass their region or visit some interesting object, such as an important port. This activity explains some of what we saw of the Soviet intelligence services in Sweden.
According to Plavins, all Warsaw Pact countries had the same system, so it was not so strange that we now and then also encountered small groups of Poles whose business in Sweden could not be easily explained. In peacetime, the different Spetsnaz units thus prepared their wartime missions.
[62] Part of this involved attempting to recruit support personnel for the logistics for the mission to be carried out. According to Suvorov, Stig Bergling was supposed to have been one of these support people.
[63] Another of the preparations was to have involved hiding the necessary equipment for the wartime mission. This is supposed to be what happened in the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia.
[64] Some arms caches are said to have been found in several places in the Western world, but so far none in Scandinavia.
Did these new units then mean that any strike against Sweden could have taken a somewhat different form than we had previously expected? We did not, of course, have any nuclear weapons in the Nordic countries, which was the main target of these units. Despite this, some of the Spetsnaz units which were involved in the fronts and fleets that were given missions against the Nordic countries ought to have also been detached against Sweden. In the book
Spetsnaz, it is calculated that a total of about 400 men could be deployed against Sweden, i.e., a force equivalent to about 50 patrol missions. So many sabotage missions, deployed using the element of surprise and with the right choice of targets, could have inflicted great damage on our invasion defences, but would hardly have been of crucial importance.
We also began to change sections of our units to become skilled in hunting down this type of special unit. The special units of professional officers, the so-called SSG, that have been in Afghanistan and the Congo over the last few years are reminiscent of these. The level of military preparedness also increased within the peace organisation’s framework for dealing with what was called by its proper name, i.e., coup de main, in the 1960s. Exercises were carried out in this every year in at least one military area. Special measures were taken to protect our pilots after visits from so-called Polish sellers of paintings in their homes.
For the Spetsnaz units to achieve anything decisive, targeting the political decision-making level was required (cf., the Prague Invasion above). Kidnapping or murdering a member of the royal family or the most senior political leaders, who were also put under pressure through sabotage against various social functions and terrorist attacks on population targets in the large cities, emerged as a possible way of achieving rapid results; what came to be called Strategic Attack in the planning in the end of the 1980´s. If nuclear weapons had already been used in the major conflict, it would obviously have been easier to convince the political leadership that there was no point resisting.