Submarines in Swedish Territorial Waters 1980–2000:
Reply to the Two Rejoinders by Ambassador Ekéus
by Krister Wahlbäck
|
Readers outside Sweden may find it hard to understand how a public inquiry into past submarine incursions in Swedish waters can provoke so much dispute. One major reason, obviously, is that the report brought back to life issues which were controversial in most Western countries back in the 1980's: how to assess the Soviet Union, her political system and her international ambitions. In Sweden, the submarine incursions also revived old debates about Soviet intentions towards Scandinavia and Sweden, and about prospects that Swedish neutrality would be respected in case of war. An official report claiming to review these questions historically in a more sophisticated way than previously is bound to attract critical scrutiny. An even more important reason is the unusual way in which the inquiry was set up. When controversial matters in Sweden's recent history need to be scrutinized, there is an established procedure developed over several decades. It is for the Government to appoint an investigative Commission, chaired by a respected personality who has not been involved in the events he is charged with exploring. Furthermore, the members should be independent individuals, some of them professional researchers. I think it is fair to say that the established practice has ensured the reputation for integrity that these Commissions have acquired in Swedish society.[1] In the case at hand, however, the inquiry was organized in a way that challenged this custom. One single person, a diplomat enjoying the esteem of the Government in power but lacking any research experience, was tasked to investigate crucial and controversial parts of Sweden's security policy in the recent past. No experienced researchers or independent personalities were recruited as members in order to check and vouch for the quality and integrity of the report, even though it dealt with occurrences at a time when the investigator was himself already an influential player in the Foreign Ministry.[2] We don't know whether the Swedish Government chose to organize the inquiry in this way in order to introduce a new practice, or whether it was a one-time measure due to political expediency, or perhaps simply a thoughtless mistake. However that may be, the unusual setup of Ambassador Ekéus's investigation explains, I think, why it has been read with some attention by two groups of people. First, by those who believe that reconstruction and analysis of historical events require the input of professional researchers, in particular when the inquiry is to result in an official report. Second, by those who feel that for public inquiries to attain the necessary credibility, they should include several independent personalities, ideally representing somewhat different political perspectives. In his two rejoinders Ambassador Ekéus prefers to say nothing about the part of my comment in which I discussed these concerns. Readers outside Sweden, though, would be wise to keep them in mind. While Mr. Ekéus may like to have his report appear as comparable to previous public inquiries into other controversial parts of Sweden's contemporary history, his critics – including myself - may wish to demonstrate the pitfalls of neglecting traditional safeguards against subjective and superficial inquiries into historical issues of national importance. Thus, the underlying issue may be whether or not the Government should be persuaded to go back to the established practice after an unfortunate experiment. If so, the stakes are pretty high. This would explain the agitated intonation of his first rejoinder. The controversies surrounding the present report would hardly have occurred, however, unless it had displayed a number of eye-catching flaws. In my comment, I presented some thirty examples, many of them based on observations by colleagues in the Swedish research and security policy communities. For his rejoinder no. 2, Ambassador Ekéus has picked those examples in which he apparently feels that the case for the defence is reasonably strong. Of course, experienced readers will take a look at the numerous critical points which I reported in my comment but to which Mr. Ekéus has felt unable to respond. Yet it is excellent that Mr. Ekéus has cared to write his second rejoinder. Those who have been officially assigned to clarify issues in contemporary history should make an effort to explain the report they have produced, and defend or correct the conclusions they have drawn. On one point, Mr. Ekéus is right in correcting me. His assignment covered the years 1980-2000. When I choose "Submarine Incursions in Swedish Waters, 1980-1992" as heading for my comment, I had in mind that these were the years of confirmed submarine incursions according to his report.[3] Ambassador Ekéus starts out by excusing the nature of his "strategic perspective" – in my view, its superficiality - by referring to his second report on Sweden's entire security policy in 1969-1989, published in December 2002. However, this second report does not in any way broaden or deepen the strategic perspective on the Baltic/North European region which was presented in the first report to explain motives for the submarine incursions. In fact, the few pages devoted to this subject are simply a résumé of the first report.[4] In particular, Ambassador Ekéus still refuses to tell the reader at which locations in Swedish waters the 35-40 incursions occurred which he considers to be either established beyond doubt or indicated by such evidence that the incidents "should be taken seriously". After all, it should be obvious that in order to make credible his thesis that the incursions may well have been performed by West German subs preparing attacks on Soviet sea-borne transports to the Central front, he has to tell the reader where these incursions/incidents took place and discuss the usefulness of these locations for the presumed purpose. Anyone taking a look at a map of the Baltic Sea area will wish to know why, if the Ekéus thesis is correct, the incursions did not take place in Swedish waters reasonably close to the convoy lanes used by these Soviet transports, i.e. close to the Soviet shores of the Baltic Sea (for instance, in Swedish waters along the eastern coast of Gotland). Both former Prime Minister Carl Bildt and I have tried to elicit some clarification from Ambassador Ekéus by pointing out, tongue in cheek, that incursions deep into the Swedish archipelagos and naval base areas, or in the Gulf of Bothnia, do not seem to make much sense for West German subs looking for staging areas from which to attack in time of war Soviet convoys hundreds of miles away. By indignantly rejecting the notion that he had ever suggested anything like that, Mr. Ekéus now implicitly absolves the Bundesmarine as far as these incursions and incidents are concerned. Fine, but what about all the other occurrences in Swedish waters, not quite as remote from the presumed target areas for West German subs, but still much too far away for the thesis of Mr. Ekéus to be credible ? His stubborn refusal to identify and discuss their locations is rather revealing. There is one important point, however, on which Ambassador Ekéus and I agree. It would indeed have been a great advantage for the Bundesmarine in a war to be able to base their subs in Swedish archipelagos, i.e. to move into friendly Swedish waters the surface store ships intended for restocking and maintenance of the subs. The fatal flaw in the reasoning of Mr. Ekéus, though, is that he fails to make any distinction between this scenario and the very different one of West German subs covertly and against Swedish wishes seeking refuge and protection from Soviet ASW in neutral Swedish waters. (He simply talks about German subs "using" Swedish waters, an unfortunate umbrella formula.) The first, "basing" scenario is the only one which would enable the Germans to present a reasonably sustained threat to Soviet convoys in the Baltic. But such deployments would be easily visible, and could only occur with Swedish consent, i.e. after Sweden had been drawn into the war. Ambassador Ekéus invokes the need for peacetime incursions by the West Germans in order to "practice" wartime operations. If he has in mind the basing scenario, covert practice incursions by subs, without the other parts of the force, makes little sense militarily. If he, as seems more likely, is thinking in terms of a "refuge" scenario, practice incursions by West German subs seems rather farfetched a notion, considering the military facts.[5] (In contrast, if the intruding power executes incursions in order to check, for instance, how to knock out vital installations in Swedish archipelagoes, his subs do need to penetrate these waters, close to the mainland of Sweden but far away from Soviet shipping lanes.) Mr. Ekéus ignores these fairly elementary distinctions. Analytically, this is an even more serious defect than his refusal to indicate locations of incursions and incidents. Together, they make a mockery of his claim in his report to have presented "a more sophisticated" assessment of the motives for the incursions. These defects invalidate the "clear motive" presented by him for West German incursions. Moreover, they undermine his conclusion that East and West should be put on equal footing as potential violators. True, Ambassador Ekéus denies that this is in fact the conclusion of his report. In his attempt to uphold this denial, he writes as if the concluding statement in his Summary did not exist – rather recklessly, I think, in view of the fact that any PHP reader can check Ambassador Ekéus's own wording (p. 369) in the Summary of his report published in full above on the PHP website. The Summary – and, of course, its Swedish original "Sammanfattning" – are always written with utmost care in the reports of Swedish official investigations. Everyone knows that they are the only part of a voluminous report which will be read on publication day by journalists and politicians. By disowning his own Summary Ambassador Ekéus certainly does not increase confidence in the care with which he has prepared the rest of his report.[6] On a positive note, it should be observed that in his rebuttal Ambassador Ekéus does admit that "there were probably stronger motives for the Soviet Union – to penetrate the Swedish archipelagos". Thus he confirms one of the post-publication reassessments of his report referred to in my comment. On some points at least, he is discreetly trimming his sails, having noticed that he had gone too far. On the other hand, Ambassador Ekéus still tries to cling to an interpretation of the 1981 "Whiskey on the Rocks" incident which would clear the Soviets of responsibility for a deliberate incursion (ending with the disastrous stranding of the sub). Thus he does not retract his story of a Soviet "search operation" for the U 137 east of Bornholm in 1981, far away from the Karlskrona naval base area, indicating that the sub's incursion there may in fact have been unintended. However, for the first time Ambassador Ekéus now admits that the Soviets never referred to any such operation to support their stand that the incursion was due to a "navigational mistake". This is indeed a telling fact. Even though the Soviets (and later the Russians) had to endure quite thorough discussions with Swedish experts on precisely this point, their inventiveness was not sufficiently fertile for them to launch, as evidence of their innocence, a story of Soviet forces searching for their U 137 far away from Karlskrona. Unfortunately, Ambassador Ekéus makes no attempt to explain why he does not mention in his report the fact that the Soviets never invoked any search operation. Still less does he make any excuses for neglecting to do so. It does not inspire confidence in the integrity of his report to learn that he sees nothing wrong in excluding facts which do not square with his theses. In his report, Ambassador Ekéus claimed that "the Soviet side searched for the submarine for six hours in its designated patrolling area east of the island of Bornholm".[7] Now he talks about "puzzling movements" on the part of Soviet naval units and aircrafts, but maintains that these "seem to indicate" a search operation. Among those visiting the PHP website there are probably specialists who are familiar with the characteristics of genuine SAR operations, and who can assess and comment on the quality of these statements.[8] Let me add at this point that hopefully German naval experts will soon join a discussion which after all largely deals with the war plans for the submarines of the Bundesmarine. With one exception, the remaining points in Ambassador Ekéus's rejoinder are based on misconceptions which are best dealt with in a footnote.[9] The exception is Ambassador Ekéus' claim that there were no official Swedish-Soviet exchanges on submarine-related issues between April 1983 and 1991. He asks sarcastically whether I was referring to "cocktail conversations" in my comment when I concurred with those critics who have deplored the absence of any description and analysis of these exchanges. The only conclusion I can draw from this question is that Ambassador Ekéus has considered it inexpedient to consult the numerous documents in the Swedish MFA archive which detail important Swedish-Soviet meetings (like that between, for instance, Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson and Mr. Gorbachev in April 1986). Yet the way in which the Swedish side chose to refer to the submarine incursions, or not to do so, and to respond to Soviet dressing downs, is crucial for understanding Moscow's assessment of Swedish receptivity to pressure. This assessment guided decisions at the political level on the utility of further incursions. As a professional diplomat, Mr. Ekéus is of course aware of these simple facts. Again, I am sorry to conclude that his bypassing of source material which illuminates Soviet-Swedish exchanges during eight years of submarine incursions does not increase confidence in the quality of his report. An inquiry with a professional and pluralistic set-up would have avoided most, if not all, of the grave defects identified in my comment and confirmed, I have to say, by the inadequacy of Ambassador Ekéus’s rejoinders.
|
