History This incident is sufficiently covered in the press and in the memoirs of veterans of the subfloat. There is no need to waste time discussing it - Russia still claims that this was a consequence of a navigational error, those serving in the Baltic Fleet in those years are inclined to the same point of view, mentioning also the crew’s sloppiness (there is no reliable evidence of this). The Swedes are sincerely convinced that it was a Soviet reconnaissance operation, and that the boat had at least two torpedoes with a nuclear warhead on board.
Fatal Incident: C-363 and the first Swedes about
But much more interesting is what was after. And after that there was a lot of things, and most of this “a lot” in our country, unfortunately, is completely unknown and not realized.
Sweden geographically dominates the Baltic Sea on the one hand, and is not part of the NATO bloc on the other. This neutrality, I must say, is very “pro-Western” - so the Swedish submarine “Gottland” was based in the USA for several years, where the Americans perfected their PLO on it. But the degree of "pro-Western" Swedish policy is now much higher than it was in the late seventies. And the reasons for this are closely related to the C-363 incident.
Starting from the sixties, the Swedes, suspicious to paranoia (for example, the systematic mining of their territorial waters is the norm - just in case) recorded six incidents, which they designated as incidents with submarines, successively in 1962, 1966, 1969, 1974, 1976 and 1980's. Five incidents in 18 years. In this case, the incident in 1966 year was a multi-day chase, with the use of depth charges on a foreign submarine. Detect, however, failed. A separate case is the case of espionage of the Soviet submarine that frightened the Swedes on the border of the Swedish territorial waters, followed by entry into them - this was a rare case when the submarine was identified. And then - With-363.
It is not known exactly whose submarines the Swedes had discovered before, and some discovery facts can be questioned altogether. But after the C-363 the Swedes seemed to burst.
After C-363, the number of foreign submarines in the Swedish territorial waters has increased dramatically, and evidence of more arrogant specs began to appear. foreign naval operations. Mindful of the C-363, the Swedes threw all the responsibility on the USSR, and more and more drifted into the arms of NATO.
Here is a list of incidents in the eighties:
1. October 1 - October 13 1982 of the year. Signs of a submarine near Harsfjord (Swede. Hårsfjärden). Four Swedish ground bottom mines were detonated, PLO forces used 44 depth charges to reach the submarine. To no avail. However, there is another opinion about the release of this submarine into neutral waters and below it will be announced.
2. May 1983 of the year. Two cases. The first is the detonation of anchor mines in the Törefjörd (Swede.Törefjärden) fjord of the Bothnian Bay, and the PLO helicopter’s contact with the submarine near the town of Sundsvall (Swede. Sundsvall).
3. Summer 1983 of the year. Search submarines in Terreviken (Swede. Töreviken).
4. August 1983 of the year. Hunting for a submarine in the bay of Karlskrona and the archipelago of the same name. The boat was allegedly found right in the base of the Swedish Navy, depth charges were used.
5. February 9 - February 29 1984 of the year. Another search operation in the bay of Karlskrona. Used 22 depth charges.
6. June 1986 of the year. In the area of the island of Gotland, eyewitnesses noticed that “something” was immersed in water. A survey of the seabed was conducted, the presence of traces of an underwater tracked vehicle at the bottom was found, the length of the trail was 1100 meters.
Soviet tracked vehicles for movement on the bottom. In the United States, these were also there.
7. June 1987 of the year. Acoustic contact with the boat in the Törefjörf fjord.
8. Summer 1987 of the year. The town of Kappelhamnsviken (Swede. Kappelhamnsviken) of the island of Gotland, clear traces of an underwater vehicle were found on the seabed.
9. June 1988 of the year. Presumably a foreign submarine was found in Hovrigebukten Bay (Swede. Hävringebukten) in the area of Oxelosund (Swede. Oxelösund). Recorded noise of propellers and purging of ballast tanks.
And then how cut. And the Swedes did not find any more boats in their waters for the time being. And there was not even a hint.
The next time a foreign submarine will be spotted only in the fall of the year 2014. We will come back to this later, but for now let's estimate the correlation.
What did we have in the eighties? In the eighties, the team of Ronald Reagan Crusaders maniacs went on the attack on the USSR, on all fronts, from the oceans to Afghanistan. And as soon as the figures from the Baltic Fleet indicated the possibility of finding a Soviet submarine in the Swedish territorial waters, such discoveries began to flow, and the Swedes had various material evidence at their disposal.
And in 2014? In 2014 was the Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. And - lo and behold! - in the territorial waters of Sweden again began to show up submarines. Whose? Of course, the Russians, who can still climb in the Swedish territorial waters, were a precedent ...
As is clear from the statistics, unknown, but presumably Russian, submarines begin to surf the Swedish waters when the United States and Britain need to aggravate relations between the Russian Federation and Europe. In other periods there is nothing like that.
According to social surveys, from 1980 to 1983. the proportion of Swedes who saw the threat in the USSR increased from 10 to 45 percent. And, as a result, Swedish neutrality has slowly ceased to be neutrality, and now, in fact, it is not. There are no guarantees that Sweden will not join NATO in the near future.
But what was all this about? Did the USSR really want to spoil themselves so much that they pushed the Swedes to membership in the North Atlantic Alliance? And why should Russia send a submarine to Swedish waters in 2014? This is, after all, beyond good and evil, it is unlikely in the world there is a country less interested in strengthening NATO than Russia.
What's the matter?
The answer was given by a man named Ole Tunander, a very prominent and influential public figure in Sweden, an expert on foreign and domestic policy, a political scientist, a sociologist, a journalist and a writer. Tunander, who is one of the leading researchers of the phenomenon of the “deep state” (deep state), and by what methods this “deep state” operates, discovered later in his research that Sweden has not passed this cup. And that in the depths of Swedish society there are structures that, in aggregate, Tunander himself calls “Military Sweden”, as opposed to the obvious, “Neutral Sweden”.
From the words of Tunander himself, in 90-ies of the twentieth century, during interviewing with him various officials, both in Sweden and the USA and in other countries, he often heard that in fact, a huge number of foreign submarines in the Swedish waters was not a delusion of the Swedes, nor the Soviet submarines. In the first half of the 90, some high-ranking US Navy officers told him directly. It was then, according to his confession, that he stopped believing in the official version of Soviet espionage. But that was only the beginning.
In the early nineties, Thunander met the captain of the US Navy, Robert Bathurst, a former assistant naval attache of the United States in Moscow on the 60, who served in military and administrative posts at the Pentagon, in intelligence of the United States Navy in Europe and other structures. After the end of the Cold War, Bathhurst, married to a Norwegian citizen, came to Scandinavia and ended up in Norway, where he met Tunander, who was then working in Oslo, at the International Peace Research Institute. There Tunander and persuaded him to start working at the institute with him. It was then that Bathhurst learned from Thunander about his suspicions regarding western submarines.
In 2000, former US Secretary of Defense under Reagan, Caspar Weinberger, in one of his TV interviews, stated that during the Cold War, American submarines regularly "tested" the Swedish anti-submarine defense, of course, in agreement with the Swedish military. But Tunander, who by that time was already interested in the question, knew that at least officially there were no such agreements between the United States and Sweden. This sharply spurred his interest in the question and he asked for Bethurst, who had become his friend by that time to help him figure it out.
The friend did not refuse, and made a trip to the USA, where he tried to interview his former colleagues, both from the sub-melt and intelligence, and from the special units of SEAL. But instead of answering, he received an extremely insistent recommendation from his colleagues to keep his mouth shut and not get into such questions.
Two months later, Bathhurst died suddenly for everyone. By this time, Thunander was already in full questioning high-ranking military and diplomats on issues relating to the history of submarines. He was lucky, and soon he was able to get some pretty interesting evidence from Einar Ainstesensen, a Norwegian diplomat, in 80-s involved in the process of making policy decisions for Norway, including NATO-related political decisions. Einsteensen shocked him, saying the following during the conversation.
The submarine, which the Swedish Navy drove depth charges at Harsfiord, was not Soviet. It was an American mini-submarine, and she was there without any permission from the Swedish authorities, which resulted in the use of weapons. And this application was successful - the boat received heavy damage, and it would have been finished off, but for some reason, at the last moment, the Swedish Navy received orders to release it into neutral waters.
Einsteensen could still tell a lot, and he was not against it, but after the very first conversation with Tunander, he, too, died suddenly. Tunander himself recalled later that quite a few high-ranking officers and the military with whom he came in contact died very quickly.
Nevertheless, Thunander managed to collect a huge array of information, and in 2001, he combined all his interviews and collected materials into the book The Secret War Against Sweden. Underwater deception of the USA and Great Britain in the 1980's. ” In the same year, the book was published in Swedish, and a little later, in 2004, in English.
A book full of transcripts of radio communications and testimonies of participants in a hunt for submarines reads like a thriller. The picture of NATO’s epic many years of provocation against the USSR, which was aimed at turning Sweden from the path of a neutral state, is described in detail. Tunander is trying to be objective. Thus, describing the evidence of naval officers who participated in the 1982 operation of the year, he mentions that the Navy identified the radar signal from a West German-made submarine. But it indicates that the equipment that the naval forces had at that time did not allow to accurately distinguish the radar signal of the submarine from the navigation radar of a civilian vessel, moreover, the error in determining the location of the radar station in those years made it impossible to determine exactly which side of the territorial waters border . The whole book Tununder replete with such details from the direct participants in the events.
At the same time, Thunander gives evidence of the boat commander "Fashion»That he did not find any civilian courts in the radar area.
Tununder cites hundreds of facts that summarize what they are talking about.
After the Soviet stupidity with C-363, the United States and Britain launched a series of psychological impact operations on Swedish society (later, by 2009, Tunader showed that these operations had the support of some Swedish elites interested in joining NATO) in order to convince the Swedes that they were victims of Soviet intelligence and subversion. To do this, using the allies, the United States and Britain regularly sent ultra-small submarines, SEAL detachments with underwater vehicles, including tracked ones for traveling along the bottom, into the Swedish territorial waters, with the task of conducting demonstrative actions that would convince the Swedes that the Russians had not calmed down and continue to penetrate their territorial waters. The United States and Britain used in their activities diesel submarines of NATO allies (although the NATO structures had nothing to do with this, these were operations conducted under the command of the United States and a bit of Britain). And these operations were a dizzying success - the neutrality of Sweden was really undermined, and the hostility of Sweden towards the USSR really increased significantly.
Tununder was supported by people like Karl Rolf Ekeus, a former Swedish ambassador to Washington, who conducted his own investigation into the ties between the American and Swedish military, and the former Finnish president, Mauno Koivisto. The latter said the following: in his time, in a conversation with him, the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Yuri Andropov, convincingly asked him to immediately sink any submarine, which the Finns would notice in their territorial waters. Koivisto did not doubt that Tunander was right and called the actions of the Anglo-Saxons in the Swedish territorial waters a provocation.
But the final result is important.
Although the deception of the Anglo-Saxons revealed, it had little effect. First, the sediment remained. Many years of propaganda against the Russians have borne fruit, and the fact that in fact we have nothing to do, did not make the Swedes better towards us. Secondly, during the eighties, the Anglo-Saxons actively infiltrated the Swedish elites, literally cultivating their people there, as a result of which they now have carte blanche for subversive actions - whatever they did against Sweden, an essential part of the Swedish politician and The military will support this, so long as the owners are satisfied. In recent years, Sweden has become a real source of personnel for all sorts of globalist, pro-American international organizations, and the heat of Russophobia there would “do honor” to most NATO countries. And this is the result of the work of the Americans, which was started by the submarine forces of the US Navy, and not by someone else, and our defeat.
It is not surprising that the successful recipe was used again when it was again necessary to make an enemy out of Russia.
In October, 2014, in the Swedish territorial waters, again spotted a submarine. Under the periscope. In the afternoon. Near the shore. Many times. In one of which - by chance, completely by accident - the photographer of the Reuters agency was next. British agency. With a camera, of course, what kind of photographer walks without a camera?
Periscope off the coast in the afternoon. Professionalism "Russian" is amazing, even if the next blockbuster shoot with stupid Ivan, balalaika and bears. Or is someone intentionally substituted?
In the chain of events, of course, it would be worthwhile to introduce the fact that the then Minister of Defense of Sweden, Peter Hulqvist, was a supporter of joining NATO, and that the command of the Swedish Navy was “cleansed” long ago and there was no one there who really was puzzled by the Swedish sovereignty, or would put it above the interests of the suzerain, and the fact that in those October days, according to the Russian Defense Ministry, the Dutch (NATO) submarine Bruinvis was in the area, but who cares? Moreover, this submarine a couple of days after I. Konashenkov’s statement hit the frame of one of the Swedish photographers - here it is.
But it was too late.
The Western press, from yellow to professional naval, was noted in the most detailed articles about how democratic Sweden is looking for someone, it seems, a Russian submarine, and how the whole free world supports it. The fact of getting the Dutch submarine into the lens has not yet been reflected in any major Western media - just like that, just ignore the evidence when the American empire is behind you. And the desired effect was again achieved despite everything, Sweden, with the support of its population, froze military cooperation with Russia, and now takes an extremely hard-nosed Russophobic position on all issues related to our country.
And the first entry of “Military Sweden”, the Swedish “Deep State” into the arena, was precisely the passage of an American submarine into neutral waters in 1982.
This is how it works.
Anglo-Saxon operations with submarines are a great example of peacetime operations that had a strategic effect. Unfortunately, in Russia the overwhelming majority of the population and a significant part of the elites simply cannot imagine what was happening in the Swedish territorial waters and what it eventually led to. We laugh at the suspicions of ordinary Swedes and moan about what they actually saw there instead of a submarine, not realizing that the submarines there are quite real, and the operations they carry out cause us great damage. We would learn from our enemies, and, perhaps, they could inflict some damage, perhaps think of how we will cover all this for ordinary inhabitants of Scandinavia and will be able to play back the political damage inflicted on us ...
But we are as usual.
Of interest is also the kind of structures and forces that carried out all this huge sabotage. After all, such operations should have had a specific performer, a deeply secret structure, controlled from the very "top", with a minimum length of command chains to prevent leaks. And it should be headed by a very non-trivial person, deeply understanding how to influence the situation with the help of the naval forces and achieve strategic goals. And all this should be in the shadows, not in sight.
To be continued ...