C-byrån ("C bureau") was a Swedish secret intelligence agency established in 1939, sorting under the

Swedish Armed Forces The Swedish Armed Forces ( sv, Försvarsmakten, "the Defense Force") is the government agency that forms the armed forces of Sweden, tasked with the defense of the country as well as with promoting Sweden's wider interests, supporting internat ...

. It was led by Major Carl Petersén. During

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the World War II by country, vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great power ...

C-byrån organized operations in the German-occupied Norway and

Operation Stella Polaris Operation Stella Polaris was the cover name for an operation in which Finnish signals intelligence records, equipment and personnel were transported into Sweden in late September 1944 after the end of combat on the Finnish-Soviet front in the ...

in Finland.

History

When

broke out in 1939, Sweden lacked a modern military intelligence agency. Major Carl Petersén was assigned to establish it. C-byrån (before 1942 called ''G-sektionen'') was established in 1939, a few months after the outbreak of the war, after a joint campaign of the then Supreme Commander

Olof Thörnell General Olof Gerhard Thörnell (19 October 1877 – 25 July 1977) was a Swedish Army officer. He was Sweden's first Supreme Commander from 8 December 1939 until 1944. Before 1939 that had been the role of the King. Early life Thörnell was bor ...

and the head of the Intelligence Department of the Defence Staff, Colonel

Carlos Adlercreutz Colonel Axel Fredrik Carlos Adlercreutz (26 January 1890 – 7 October 1963) was a Swedish Army officer. Adlercreutz is credited with the formation of the General Security Service (''Allmänna säkerhetstjänsten'') in 1938 (predecessor of the ...

. Carl Petersén and his second in command,

Helmuth Ternberg Ernst Axel ''Hellmuth'' "Teddy" Ternberg (13 September 1893 – 24 May 1971) was a Swedish Army major and intelligence officer who led, together with Carl Petersén, the intelligence service C-byrån during World War II. One of the most spectacu ...

, shared responsibility for the information gathering missions between them: Petersén gathered information from the

Allies An alliance is a relationship among people, groups, or states that have joined together for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out among them. Members of an alliance are called ...

, while Ternberg engaged in

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bo ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG),, is a country in Central Europe. It is the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany lies between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the sou ...

Hungary Hungary ( hu, Magyarország ) is a landlocked country in Central Europe. Spanning of the Carpathian Basin, it is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine to the northeast, Romania to the east and southeast, Serbia to the south, Croa ...

and Switzerland. Ternberg's primary source of information, according to himself, was the head of the German ''

Abwehr The ''Abwehr'' ( German for ''resistance'' or ''defence'', but the word usually means ''counterintelligence'' in a military context; ) was the German military-intelligence service for the '' Reichswehr'' and the ''Wehrmacht'' from 1920 to 1944. ...

'',

Wilhelm Canaris Wilhelm Franz Canaris (1 January 1887 – 9 April 1945) was a German admiral and the chief of the ''Abwehr'' (the German military-intelligence service) from 1935 to 1944. Canaris was initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler, and the Nazi re ...

. Ternberg was a German-friendly person, but for that sake not a

Nazi Nazism ( ; german: Nazismus), the common name in English for National Socialism (german: Nationalsozialismus, ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hit ...

sympathizer, however, deeply conservative and nationalist. He was like Petersén an adventurer. One of the first people that was linked to the agency was

Gunnar Jarring Gunnar Valfrid Jarring (12 October 1907 – 29 May 2002) was a Swedish diplomat and Turkologist. Early life Jarring was born in Brunnby, Malmöhus County, Sweden, the son of Gottfrid Jönsson, a farmer, and his wife Betty (née Svensson). He had ...

, who had the responsibility to attach as many academics as possible to the agency, which began in earnest in 1942. Thede Palm was one of them, PhD and friend of future prime minister

Tage Erlander Tage Fritjof Erlander (; 13 June 1901 – 21 June 1985) was a Swedish politician who served as Prime Minister of Sweden from 1946 to 1969. He was the leader of the Swedish Social Democratic Party and led the government for an uninterrupted tenu ...

from their time at

Lund University , motto = Ad utrumque , mottoeng = Prepared for both , established = , type = Public research university , budget = SEK 9 billion Ternberg had good contacts with Wilhelm Canaris and its local organization in Stockholm, the so-called Wagner Agency. But Ternberg also recruited one of the employees, Erika Schwarze, as a secret agent, against the Germans and only for the Swedes. Other people linked to C-byrån was art historian Stig Roth and the artist Algot Törneman. At the end of

, there were 149 people listed in service at C-byrån, which was housed in the so-called ''Centralen'' in an apartment at Sibyllegatan 49 in Stockholm. In 1946 C-byrån ceased to exist and Petersén and Ternberg was forced to quit. C-byrån ceased to exist after some alleged irregularities, which, however, could never be proved. The operations was investigated by the so-called C-byrån Investigation (''C-byråutredningen'') led by judge Erik Tammelin. T-kontoret (''T office)'' established in 1946 and headed by Thede Palm, continued C-byrån's operations. The archives of C-byrån was in 1967 handed over by Palm to the Military Archives. According to Palm, the archives had then been cleaned out. For example, the records of all people, Swedish and foreign who had been involved in the agency's operations or come in contact with it, had been destroyed. This has later been confirmed by other former C-byrån employees.

History

See also

References

Further reading