Comment, by Milton Leitenberg
I have just read your introduction, Mysterious Submarines in Swedish Waters, and as you say that “. . . (we) wish to encourage further comments by experts,” I do have several comments: 1. There have actually been five reports, and not three. The 1995 report that you referred to was not the next to follow after the 1983 Commission. There were two other reports in addition to the 1983 and 1995 ones, both also commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the 1990s. The first was written by Dr. Bo Huldt, a historian who was at the time the Director of the Swedish Institute of International Affairs. The second was written in 1996 by Dr. Lars Erik-Lundin, a member of the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lundin had a staff of three assistants and access to secret government documents as well as the ability to interview relevant sitting or retired officials. The report has since been declassified. 2. The 1995 Commission and its results have to be considered inadequate, as they ruled major areas of known evidence as being outside of their mandate and considerations. This could be compared to inspecting the proverbial elephant by chopping the elephant in half to do so, then inspecting either its front or its back end alone. The conclusions that this group arrived at were therefore by definition bound to be incomplete. It was at least in part for this reason that the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned the 1996 report. 3. Amb. Ekeus’ comment of July 16, 2002 that establishing the nationality of the submarines in Swedish waters “. . . was not a major feature of the report or of the debate,” is not a serious remark. It most certainly was a very major feature “of the debate.” Amb. Ekeus may not have chosen to make it a major feature of his report, but it is difficult to understand how the assignment “to describe and evaluate how the Government, the Armed Forces and other competent authorities dealt with established and apparent underwater violations of Swedish territorial waters since the early 1980s” could be undertaken and fulfilled without including the best evaluation possible of the national derivation of the submarines in the instances when the answer was not immediately obvious, as it was in the October 1981 virtually onshore stranding of the Soviet Whisky-class U-137 submarine. For example, one of the very opening lines in Lundin’s 1996 report states that “It is of determining significance to a national security assessment of these events which state or states were responsible for the violations (translated from the Swedish). 4. It is a pity that you do not include among the documentation on your site any reference to or extracts from the book Soviet Submarine Operation in Swedish Waters: 1980–1986 (CSIS, Washington Papers, 1987) by Milton Leitenberg. The draft of this study was distributed among Swedish government officials 18 months before it was published and was read by quite senior officials and members of Parliament. Although the author did not have access to any classified materials, he was able to carry out a small number of interviews with Swedish military and Ministry officials. Some members of the Swedish government described it as the most thorough survey of the subject available at that time, including any that had been produced within government agencies. At the same time some members of the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs made strenuous efforts to see that the study was not published in Sweden, which had been the original intention. 5. One point can be added to the comment by Tom Nichols in which he notes that “similar operations apparently took place in Alaska,” presumably by Soviet submarines. He suggests that these may have been for purposes of practicing infiltration or special operations. Publicly recorded incursions by Soviet submarines in internal waters also took place in Norway, Japan, Greenland, Italy and Finland (These are all reviewed in the above mentioned book.). The most well known events aside from those in Sweden were those in Norway in Sognefjord in 1972, in Hardangerfjord in 1983, and in Andsfjord, off Andoy Island, also in 1983. All of these are in the public record. However, there was at least one other group of incursions that may have had the most obvious implications for the US-USSR Cold War confrontation that is heretofore not in the public record. In the years before 1987, Soviet submarines also landed military personnel on some US Pacific Ocean island bases at which the US Air Force maintained B-52 nuclear capable bombers. MILTON LEITENBERG is Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security Studies at the University of Maryland (CISSM). |
