Swedish and British security officialdom, a suspected spy, and information management in the era of the Second World War

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses Swedish and British security officialdom with a focus on information-management techniques in a pre-electronic information order. It examines the challenges security officials faced in investigating a Finnish sea captain suspected of espionage during the Second World War. Information about him emanated from three communication contexts – a police station, an interrogation centre, and an immigration office. The British security establishment was confronted with information asymmetries; although information about the case existed in the files, it was not available to officials working in different temporal and geographical settings. There were also marked differences between the bureaucratic cultures of Swedish and British security agencies regarding assessment and reporting of security information. The article shows that the captain worked for the German military intelligence and maintained contact with British officials in Stockholm, but was never imprisoned. On the basis of this case, four suspect interrogation survival strategies can be delineated: playing the victim, seeking favour by flattery, bold exaggeration and appeals to ideological congruence. To some extent, these survival strategies contradict the conventional wisdom in criminal-psychological research on the behaviour of guilty suspects. Rather than keeping stories simple, the sea captain inundated the interrogators with bizarre details to avoid detection.