The assassination of Olof Palme — the Swedish prime minister shot dead on a Stockholm street in 1986 — is a case John Kiriakou came to only recently, and which changed how he reads the city. He was walked through it minute by minute by Swedish hosts who had spent years researching it, and treats it as a professional problem rather than a political one.
”Somebody finally shot Olof Palme”
Kiriakou’s own memory of the night is secondhand and unflattering to his company. In 1986 he was a college senior dating a woman from Greece. They met for dinner and she was beaming. He asked why. “Because somebody finally shot Olof Palme.” His reply: “Shame on you. Olof Palme was the prime minister.”[1][2]
The walk
What made the difference decades later was physical. His hosts in Sweden — people who had, in his words, “done deep dives on this issue, deep dives” — walked him step by step from the cinema to the spot where Palme was killed, and took him through the night minute by minute. He describes it as something for which he is “going to be forever grateful.”[1][3]
The sequence, as he recounts it: because Sweden was “historically like one of the most peaceful places on earth,” the prime minister and his wife went to the cinema alone, with no security. The film ended around midnight. They left the theatre, turned right, walked about a block, then crossed the street because Mrs Palme wanted to look at a dress in a shop window. They looked at it briefly, turned right again, and had gone half a block when a man met them and shot Palme multiple times at point-blank range.[2][4]
The escape used the city’s terrain. Kiriakou notes that Stockholm “can be very, very hilly, like Athens” — a street simply ends and becomes near-vertical steps before resuming. The shooter ran down an alley, up the steps, on down the street, and was “lost in the night.”[5]
The two arrests that went nowhere
A Kurdish refugee was arrested, tried and convicted — and the conviction was overturned almost immediately. “The guy had nothing to do with it.” A heroin addict who happened to be in the neighbourhood was then arrested; he had not done it either, was never charged, and was released.[6]
The surveillance that thought it was a drill
The finding Kiriakou treats as decisive is the volume of watchers. Dozens of witnesses reported surveillance cars that night, “usually with two people each in them,” carrying walkie-talkies. Some of the vehicles were identified as government cars, or as unmarked police cars.[3][7]
The conclusion his hosts reached — and which he finds professionally credible — is that many of those people believed they were doing something routine. “The prime minister’s out. He went to the movies. He’s walking down the street. We’re going to do surveillance, counter-surveillance. It’s all part of the exercise.” Kiriakou adds the insider’s confirmation that this is ordinary: “we’ve all done similar things, you know, in the industry.”[7]
Then the sentence that carries the theory: “until it wasn’t an exercise, and then somebody just walked up to him and shot him dead.”[8]
Who, then
Decades of research, in his summary, have established mainly what is not true: not the Kurdish refugee, not the heroin addict, and not the Soviet Union — Palme was scheduled to meet Mikhail Gorbachev a week later. What the work points to instead is the Swedish extreme right.[5][9]
The motives he lists are three: they hated that Palme was a socialist; they hated that he was going to the Soviet Union for talks with Gorbachev, which Kiriakou stresses was “just a normal diplomatic visit”; and they hated that refugees were already beginning to arrive in Sweden in 1986. “And they decided that they’re just going to take him out.”[9][10]
The obstructed record
What Kiriakou calls the aggravating factor is official: “at every single step of the way, the government in Sweden has put roadblocks up in front of anybody attempting to carry out an independent investigation.” The specifics he lists are flight logs missing, police surveillance logs missing, and witnesses who disappeared — “apparently moved overseas without any notice.” His verdict on the possibility of a full accounting: “it’s quite impossible to do a comprehensive investigation.”[10][11]
Reading a city wrong
The case reframed Stockholm for him, and by extension the traveller’s eye generally. Kiriakou draws a standing contrast between how a tourist and a case officer see a city: a visitor to Athens looks at the Parthenon, while an officer is “worried about somebody coming out from behind this building and shooting you in the head… worried about surveillance, counter-surveillance, surveillance detection, and keeping yourself safe.”[12]
He had never been to Stockholm and had given it no such thought. The Palme case supplied the correction: “when you can murder the prime minister himself on the street in the center of the city, and over the course of 40 years nobody has been conclusively identified either as the shooter or as even a participant, then we’re probably looking at Stockholm wrong.”[13][14]
The wider Scandinavian surprise
The visit was an education for Kiriakou in a second way. He says he “simply had no idea that an extreme right wing existed in Norway and Sweden” — and by extreme he means “solidly neo-Nazi right wing.” Sweden in particular he calls “a real eye-opener.”[15][16]
His prior had come from a personal case about a decade earlier: a woman who returned home after a year in Arlington, Virginia to become a police officer in Stockholm, and who — with fluent Swedish, English and Arabic — was posted to a minority neighbourhood for community outreach. Kiriakou remembers thinking “that’s so nice, that’s so progressive, good for her,” and she had a successful career. What he had not understood was “how much the average Swede hates these refugees.” He had assumed “it was all, you know, milk and honey and everybody was happy… and that’s not the case at all.”[17][1]
His closing note is that this is not a Swedish anomaly: there is “a very powerful far right wing in Sweden, just like in Norway and just like in Germany. And it’s something that really bears watching.”[11]