Inside Sweden’s secret Cold War plan to resist a Soviet invasion

[Micael]

This is a bit of a teaser for a book that only becomes available in English in September of 2026. This article gives an outline of what it’s about. I would note that the book cover one of the stay behind structures that were active in Sweden, as I’ve noted in the past there are other pieces to the overall puzzle.

Inside Sweden’s secret Cold War plan to resist a Soviet invasion
An underground network would have evacuated dignitaries and led resistance — and the author of a new book says Stockholm should revive the system in an unstable world

Two Swedish volunteers in winter gear with a machine gun in a snowy forest during the Soviet-Finnish War.
Swedish volunteers had supported Finland in the Winter War of 1939-40 which was triggered by a Soviet invasion
KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE/GETTY IMAGES
Eden Maclachlan
, Gothenburg
Friday October 10 2025, 2.12pm BST, The Times
The invasion is as bewildering as it is sudden. As a Soviet armoured column thrusts south west through Lapland, encircling the Baltic port of Lulea, amphibious forces land on the southernmost region of Scania, the Stockholm archipelago and the island of Gotland in a series of tightly co-ordinated lightning assaults.

Within a matter of days, the Red Army is advancing into the outskirts of the Swedish capital.

Fearing the worst, the government arranges for the royal family, the prime minister and other dignitaries to be spirited away to Britain lest they fall into Joseph Stalin’s hands.

At the dawn of the Cold War, as the geopolitical map of Europe was being redrawn with dizzying speed, this scenario seemed all too plausible to Sweden’s leaders.

Operating in total secrecy and aided by British and American intelligence, a task force began work on a plan for resistance to a Soviet occupation, ranging from evacuation routes to campaigns of sabotage and guerrilla warfare.

Such “stay-behind” networks, often covertly encouraged or funded by the CIA, were a fairly common precaution across western Europe.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it emerged that similar systems had been rigged up in France, Italy, Belgium and West Germany.

Sweden’s stay-behind network has been shrouded in particular mystery, giving rise to various conspiracy theories, including that it was a clandestine outpost of Nato or even that it orchestrated the assassination of Olof Palme, the prime minister, in 1986.

Swedish politician Olof Palme makes a victory sign.
Olof Palme after his election victory in 1982
BERTIL ERICSON/TT NEWS AGENCY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
A pool of blood with scattered flowers on a sidewalk marked off by "POLIS" tape, surrounded by people, in front of a shop named "Dekorima."
Palme was shot dead while walking home from the cinema with his wife in Stockholm in 1986
SIPA/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
Now, however, a book has provided the first detailed account of what it really entailed. The political scientist Johan Wennstrom, a visiting research fellow at the Swedish Defence University, spent four years digging through archives, reading personal diaries and interviewing figures who had been involved in the organisation.

The Swedish stay-behind scheme, codenamed “Metro”, was set up in 1949 at the behest of Tage Erlander, the Social Democratic prime minister, who commissioned plans for a “resistance movement intended to come into operation if any part of the country were to be occupied by a foreign power”.

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Tage Fritiof Erlander, Prime Minister of Sweden, speaking at a microphone.
Tage Erlander served as the prime minister of Sweden from 1946 to 1969
PHOTO12/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES
“It was widely felt in Sweden that it was just a matter of time before the Soviets came and that something had to be done to counter that threat. No one wanted a repetition of April 9, 1940, when the Germans invaded Denmark and Norway, and nothing had been prepared in terms of civil resistance,” said Wennstrom.

German soldiers marching during the 1940 occupation of Denmark.
German troops occupy Denmark in 1940
ALAMY
Erlander chose four men to lead the process: the army chief, Carl August Ehrensvard, the insurance executive Alvar Lindencrona, the farming representative Anders Bjelle, and Hakan Sterky, the head of the national defence research agency, who was also working on Sweden’s secret nuclear weapons programme.

The interior minister joined the same year, and in 1950, the leader of the metalworkers’ union became the sixth member, forming a board nicknamed the “Sextuplets”. In a crisis they would in effect have served as the underground emergency government.

Hakan Sterky, Director-General of the Telegraph and Telecommaresverket (1942-1965), speaking on a telephone in front of telecommunications infrastructure.
Hakan Sterky, head of the national defence research agency
ALAMY
“These people [the representatives of the labour market organisations] are democratically elected, they represent almost everyone in the Swedish labour market. These were figures that people could really coalesce and rally around in the absence of the elected government and the royal family,” said Wennstrom.

The practical work was led by Thede Palm, a historian of religion, who was the head of the Swedish intelligence services. The exact number of people who were in on the plan is unknown but Wennstrom estimates it was a few hundred in total.

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Each member of the stay-behind operation had a codename and communicated with their colleagues primarily through letter drops at particular postboxes. Wennstrom said they were usually kept in the dark about the identities of the other planners, to keep the organisation under control and prevent any groups from going rogue.

The resistance planning was initially directed from a flat in a nondescript 19th-century redbrick building in the Kungsholmen district of central Stockholm, a few streets away from the main railway station.

It was supported by both the CIA and MI6. An escape route for the royal family, government ministers and the leader of the resistance was prepared via Norway to a headquarters somewhere in the south of England. Wennstrom has not yet been able to identify its exact location.

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“They would all escape to this exile headquarters and Alvar Lindencrona would lead the civil resistance from England,” he said. “One of my sources says in the book that Olof Palme visited this headquarters during the Cold War. So it was just another example of how prepared Sweden was for an invasion and occupation.”

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Whether the Soviets knew about the Swedish stay-behind mission at the time is unclear. During an MI6 purge of suspected communist sympathisers in 1960, the agency’s deputy head travelled to Stockholm and told the Swedes that Donald Prater, an intelligence officer operating under diplomatic cover in the local British embassy, had been working for the KGB.

The Swedish authorities thought the plan was compromised, but according to Wennstrom there was no evidence that Prater was actually a mole working for the Soviets, although he did admit to having concealed his past membership of the UK communist party.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the threat of an invasion felt less present and the existence of the Swedish resistance movement was formalised in law through a secret statutory instrument signed by King Gustaf VI Adolf.

King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden at his summer residence, Sofiero Castle, Scania.
King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden in 1972. The Swedish royal family would have been spirited abroad to England under the plan
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“This was actually a surprise to later government ministers that I interviewed. They didn’t know about it because it was somehow forgotten,” Wennstrom said. “I am the first person to have seen this document since 1955, I would argue.”

• Waiter, art dealer, soldier, spy: the Cold War’s cruellest secret agent

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The organisation’s finances were murky, but according to Wennstrom, state funding for the movement was withdrawn in 1992.

However, the organisation lived on and in the mid-1990s Robert Lugn, a former head of Sweden’s Cold War-era home guard, took over as leader.

The story comes to an abrupt end in 1994 as Wennstrom decided not to take his research any further so as not to disclose anything that might jeopardise his country’s national security today.

The scholar does not know whether the resistance network still exists today. However, Wennstrom argues that it would be sensible to revive the system if it has fallen into abeyance.

“I think it would be better to say and signal to the great powers that we have this function. It can create hell for an occupying power. Great powers are really very vulnerable to dedicated resistance movements,” he said. “That’s why I’m in favour of saying and signalling that we have this function and we will use it. It would be a deterrent.”

An English edition of Wennstrom’s book, The Stay Behinds: The Untold Story of Neutral Sweden’s Cold War Guardians, will be published in September 2026.

[Edit] The original in Swedish is out for anyone that wants to pick it up: ”Sveriges sak var vår: Den hemliga svenska motståndsrörelsen” by Johan Wennström.

[Nathan45]

Interesting, and a very different perspective from someone from the US during the cold war. Actually rubbing shoulders with the USSR would have sucked, and thats putting it mildly. I can't pretend I can fully understand what Sweden went through. I did have family in Switzerland during WW2, and got a chance to speak to a aunt who lived through it, she said it was alternatively terrified vs cautious hope as the war ebbed and flowed around them.

I'll buy the book when it comes out.

[Micael]

Interesting, and a very different perspective from someone from the US during the cold war. Actually rubbing shoulders with the USSR would have sucked, and thats putting it mildly. I can't pretend I can fully understand what Sweden went through. I did have family in Switzerland during WW2, and got a chance to speak to a aunt who lived through it, she said it was alternatively terrified vs cautious hope as the war ebbed and flowed around them.

I'll buy the book when it comes out.

Yeah it was a very different situation in some ways, and it had a large impact on society as a whole, the choices that were made, some things that persist into the current day.

I’ve read the book and it is interesting. To me who’ve consumed quite a bit of other data relating to the topic there are some new pieces of information, some who’ve been suggested in the past but gets a bit of a confirmation here, but also some things notably omitted. In at least some cases I suspect that the latter category is a result of Wennström having run the manuscript past certain people before publication, such as a former head of military intelligence which he mentions in the book. An example could be that he’s claiming to not have been able to identify the site of the exile headquarters in the UK, but also does not mention a rough location mentioned by others in the past which might have been expected. He also completely omits any mention of the alternate plan, again mentioned by others in the past, that would have sent the exile government to the US in case the UK wasn’t doable. And so on.

There are a number of new names that pop up which I think could be important for future research, opens up venues for further digging so to say.

It is a bit telling to me that the book focuses on one stay behind organisation, Metro, which is also the most well known one. He does mention Adelsfanan semi-briefly and helpfully name a number of individuals involved, Adelsfanan was (or I suspect still is) an outfit made up of mainly nobles tasked with evacuating the royal family as part of the overall stay behind structure. An extremely curt mention of the stay behind parts that were inside the intelligence services themselves is also given, but it’s telling just how curt it is, I think the former intelligence head told him to zip it about that bit. It seems like there were possibly also a fourth one towards the latter part of the cold war, with some limited information suggesting that having popped up in recent years. This is not mentioned at all in the book, even in passing. I find that a bit interesting, as when reading works relating to sensitive fields it is often worth noting what isn’t mentioned - or glossed over - as much as what is.

Finally, Wennström does offer up his own opinions and such in the book, some of which I’ll note that I don’t agree with.

[Bernard Woolley]

The UK has loads of country houses that would have been suitable. Depends on how remote they wanted to be, however.

[Micael]

The UK has loads of country houses that would have been suitable. Depends on how remote they wanted to be, however.

There’s been some unconfirmed reports in the past that it was somewhere in the general vicinity of Northwood. If a priority was easy access to the general NATO command structure, as it seems to have been from some accounts, that would probably make some sense.