Susanne Berger

In 1948 Swedish military officials considered the possibility that the loss of the ships "Iwan" and "Kinnekulle" had not been accidental, but that they had been delivered "intentionally" into Soviet hands, in retaliation for Swedish smuggling operations.
Months earlier, in November 1947, the Swedish Foreign Minister Ȍsten Undén personally met with a Swedish captain questioned by Polish authorities about smuggling activities by Swedish ships.
Also, on at least one occasion the Swedish Defense Staff used a Swedish commercial vessel to infiltrate a Secret Agent into Poland in 1946. 
All these issues may have had serious implications for Swedish ships traveling the dangerous Gdansk-Trelleborg corridor during the Cold War years.

Documentation obtained by the authors from the archive of the Swedish Military Intelligence Service (MUST) shows that in 1943, Swedish intelligence officers entered into a secret intelligence sharing agreement with high ranking members of the Hungarian General Staff regarding Communist and Soviet espionage operations. The documentation shows that a part of the communications between Swedish and Hungarian intelligence operatives was carried out via the Hungarian Legation in Stockholm. The contacts reveal that by the autumn of 1943, Swedish intelligence representatives were ready to broaden their efforts to monitor and possibly help curtail the Soviet Union's growing sphere of influence, not only in the neighboring Baltic states and Finland, but also in Central and Eastern Europe, including Hungary. Swedish involvement in such activities was especially sensitive because as of June 28, 1941, Sweden officially represented Soviet interests in Hungary and other Axis countries. The material adds several new facets to the history of Hungary's attempts to exit the war in the years 1943-1945. The newly released information also raises fundamental questions about the background of Raoul Wallenberg's humanitarian mission to Budapest in July 1944 to assist Hungary's Jews, his connection to Swedish and Anglo-American intelligence operations, as well as the official Swedish handling of Wallenberg's disappearance in 1945 and subsequent years. The documentation obtained from the MUST archive is a strong indication that additional relevant information remains to be discovered in Swedish intelligence collections and other international archives, especially those in Russia, the U.S., Hungary, and Great Britain.

If Sweden and the rest of the western world do not find their voice in defense of human rights, the tragedy of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg risks being repeated for both Swedish-Eritrean journalist Dawit Isaak and Swedish-Chinese publisher Gui Minhai - that the plight of two Swedish citizens imprisoned abroad is brushed aside and ignored.

In 1994, Pavel Sudoplatov admitted to Swedish officials that he based the claims contained in his memoir "Special Tasks" about Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg's alleged death by poisoning in 1947 entirely on information he had obtained from Russian media reports. Contrary to Sudoplatov's claims, he was not simply an outside observer of the activities of the Soviet biochemist Grigory Mairanovsky, head of the infamous MGB Toxicological Laboratory. During the years 1942-1946, Mairanovsky's laboratory was located within Sudoplatov's Terrorist Directorate, and from 1946 to 1950, Mairanovsky poisoned victims on direct orders of Sudoplatov. Consequently, if Stalin had ordered Mairanovsky to kill Raoul Wallenberg, Sudoplatov would have known about it and he did not have to guess.  In 1946-1950, Sudoplatov knew the full background of his and Mairanovsky's victims, including their names. However, until 1989, Sudoplatov did not know anything about Raoul Wallenberg and did not know his name. Therefore, Raoul Wallenberg was not part of these special killings ordered by Stalin and carried out by Sudoplatov and Mairanovsky in 1947. These facts were known to the joint Swedish-Russian Working Group that investigated the Wallenberg case during the 1990s but were not revealed in the group's two official reports released in 2000.

Team 29 Statement
Today Team 29, acting on behalf of Marie Dupuy, Raoul Wallenberg's niece, filed a claim with the Meschansky District Court of Moscow, requesting information on the fate of the Swedish diplomat who disappeared in the USSR after World War II. Through the years, Soviet and Russian governmental authorities repeatedly denied Wallenberg's family and historians studying his fate access to documents that could shed light on what had happened to him in Russia. Though more than seventy years have passed since Wallenberg's disappearance, the Russian government still refuses to tell the truth about his fate. For several years now, Team 29 has been dealing with the problems of access to Russian governmental archives. We help clients to obtain access to archive documents and seek declassification of official governmental archives. We have managed to achieve important results, such as the limitation of the term of classification for Soviet era documents to thirty years. However, a huge volume of documents related to the activities of the former Soviet State Security Services and related entities is still classified, so that many people cannot even learn the truth about the fate of their own relatives. What is there to say if even the family of a world-renowned hero of World War II cannot get information about him? We have helped Wallenberg's next-of-kin and researchers to file requests with relevant governmental bodies, asking to provide pages from specific prison interrogation registers, the arrival and departure registers of prisoners and registration lists for prisoners' belongings for the years 1945-1947. The documents in question are more than seventy years old, so that, according to existing laws, Russian authorities should provide access to these records, at least for Wallenberg's immediate family. However, the Federal Security Service of Russia (FSB) recently once again denied the family's and researchers' requests with the result that Wallenberg's relatives have now decided to turn to the court. For us, this case is not only a chance to restore the memory of an outstanding person but also a strong argument in our struggle for opening of archives belonging to the FSB and to other government bodies. We defend the right to free access to governmental information, including information about political repressions in the USSR. The fate of Raoul Wallenberg is one of the greatest mysteries in Russian history. If we manage to obtain more information on this case and clarify his fate, we will set an important legal precedent which will prove very helpful for our continued struggle for free access to governmental information.