Stig Bergling

Stig Bergling
Allegiance	Soviet Union
Active	1972–1979, 1987–1994
Birth name	Stig Svante Eugén Bergling
Born	1 March 1937 Stockholm, Sweden
Died	Stockholm, Sweden
Cause of death	Parkinson's disease
Nationality	Swedish
Spouse	Marianne Rinman (m. 1961–65) Kyllikki Kyyrö (m. 1965–73) Elisabeth Sjögren (m. 1986–97) Helena Smejko (m. 1998–2002) (and 2003–2004)
Children	1 son
Occupation	Police, reserve officer

Stig Svante Eugén Bergling, later Stig Svante Eugén Sandberg and Stig Svante Eugén Sydholt,, (1 March 1937 – 24 January 2015) was a Swedish Security Service officer who spied for the Soviet Union. The Stig Bergling-affair, one of Sweden's greatest spy scandals, began when he was arrested in Israel in 1979 and in the same year in Sweden was sentenced to life imprisonment for aggravated espionage. He fled, however, during a furlough in 1987 and escaped to Moscow after a highly acclaimed escape. Bergling lived for several years in Russia, Lebanon, Hungary, before, of health reasons, voluntarily returning to Sweden in 1994. He continued to serve his sentence until 1997, when he was paroled.

Espionage and conviction

Bergling was employed at Swedish Security Service (Säpo), and worked in the surveillance department. Bergling was also an officer in the military reserves and for a short period he was working at the Defence Staff where he stole secret documents about Swedish military installations. He sold the material to the GRU, the military intelligence of the Soviet Union, during a UN mission in Lebanon in 1973. After returning from Lebanon, he continued his espionage by delivering information about Säpo's operations in Sweden. Säpo soon discovered there was a leak and after some time the suspicions pointed towards Bergling, even if there was no proof. He once again applied for service in the UN but was arrested in Israel on 20 March 1979 for spying for the Soviet Union.

On 7 December 1979 he was convicted in Sweden and sentenced to life in prison for treason.

Escape from prison

During the time in prison, he changed his name to Stig Svante Eugén Sandberg. On 6 October 1987, while on leave from the correctional institution in Norrköping, Sweden, he and his wife, Elisabeth, managed to escape. From Rinkeby where Elisabeth lived, via Åland Islands they got to Helsinki, Finland where Bergling contacted the Soviet Embassy and managed to get help to flee to the Soviet Union.

Time abroad and the return to Sweden

Under the alias of Ivar and Elisabeth Straus, they lived for a while in Moscow. 1988-89 they lived in the Hungarian capital Budapest before they moved back to Moscow. However, in autumn of 1990 as Soviet Union was collapsing, they were moved to Lebanon. There Bergling were active under the name of Ronald Abi and pretended to be a British agricultural engineer when he worked as a security consultant for Walid Jumblatt at the end of the civil war. Jumblatt was head of the Progressive Socialist Party, a Druze-based party and ally of the Soviet Union. He first lived in Jumblatt's home in Moukhtara in the Chouf Mountains before he got his own house. Jumblatt later apologized to Sweden for having protected a convicted spy for four years but had done so at the request of his former friends in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

On 3 August 1994 the couple returned voluntarily to Sweden. On returning home, Bergling's own mother didn't know if he was alive. Bergling spent three years in prison until his release on 17 July 1997. The final time in Asptuna Prison. During the end of the prison term, his then wife became acutely ill with ahronic cancer. Bergling did not get to the hospital in time before she died on their wedding day. The year after, Bergling married the 20 years younger psychologist Elisabeth Robertson.

Later life

On 8 October 2003, Bergling met for the first time before an audience Tore Forsberg, former head of the Swedish counterintelligence, in a meeting in Akademiska Föreningen's premises in Lund.

In the middle of 2006, Bergling became a member of the Swedish Left Party, but he later left the party in September the same year, disappointed at the outcome of the elections according to Aftonbladet. In 2008 Bergling pronounced in media his support for the FRA law.

In 1992 he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and moved around, at the end of his life, using a wheelchair. In 2004 he divorced a Polish woman whom he had been married twice to. Bergling had an adult son as his ex-wife's new husband adopted. The son was adopted when he was a year and a half old. Bergling lived since October 2012 in Stockholms sjukhem and died from Parkinson's disease on 24 January 2015.

Personal life

In his first marriage, Bergling was married 1961–1965 to Marianne Rinman (1941–2009), daughter of diploma engineer Kurt Rinman. He was in his second marriage 1965–1973 married to Kyllikki Kyyrö (born 1934), and third in 1986 to Elisabeth Sjögren (also named Lillemor Geuken and Elisabeth Sandberg) (1940–1997), and in his fourth 1998–2002 and fifth 2003–2004 to psychologist Helena Smejko (also named Elisabeth Robertsson) (born 1955), a native of Poland.

Enemy's Enemy

In the novel Enemy's Enemy (1989) by author Jan Guillou, Carl Hamilton gets the task of its clients to go to Moscow and kill the spy Stig Bergling (in the book called Stig Sandström) who has escaped during his furlough, killed his wife and went to Moscow to work for the Russians. The surname Sandström was taken from the then head of the Swedish Security Service, Sune Sandström. Bergling wasn't murdered or killed his wife, but later returned to Sweden to serve the remainder of his sentence for espionage. In the 2006 edition of Enemy's Enemy, Guillou writes:

”One morning he phoned [Bergling] me from Hall Prison and woke me up. He felt that he was entitled to a dedicated copy of the book. I could only agree and wrote truthfully that this is the most remarkable dedication I have ever written. One must say that I got off cheaply.”

External links

• Radio documentary about Stig Bergling on P3 Dokumentär (Swedish)