Ghost Hunt · The US destabilisation campaign against Sweden · Cold war and covert action on Europe's Northern Flank

For a decade in the 1980s Sweden's Baltic coast was dogged by mysterious submarine intrusions from a foreign power. It was the Scandinavian foreign affairs event of the postwar are, and worried, alternately intrigued, the Swedish and global public. It contributed considerably to the worsening of the Soviet Union's reputation and the decline in credibility of Europe's "peace party" - the unilateral disarmers incuding Britain's Labour who wished to trust the Soviet Union and see it as an equal dialogue partner in peace.

Using interviews and rare published sources, the author pieces together a possible solution. Since the West's archives on its most sensitive matters are closed for 70 or a 100 years, the full story of the submarine intrusions won't be known for a while yet. One source the author spoke to said "These were Britain's most secret operations in the Cold War" and added that "every single operation was authorised by Margaret Thatcher." But the material we have suggests a picture of a political/psychological operation aimed at the Swedish government's Soviet friendly neutrality policies. It was aimed as much at the friendly regime of a Western state as at the Soviet leaders who sought to divide European public opinion from the administration in Washington, which was carrying out a high risk rearmament campaign designed to scare the Soviet Union into throwing in the towel in the Cold War.

There was also Geopolitics involved. Swedish leader Olof Palme sought, along with other European Social Democrats, to rewrite the rules of the world, focusing on poverty alleviation and creating Social Democracy as a "third force" between the two power blocs, and whose economic and democratic successes would provide a magnet for waverers on either side. Perhaps even an attractant for a Soviet Union aspiring to a new identity, especially after Gorbachev came to power. Such a move would leave Soviet power essentially intact, and threaten US hegemony in the long term, especially if Soviet West European relations ever grew warmer. Could the world have been a better place had International Social Democracy triumphed? The Thatcher Reagan axis did not only win the Cold War, but the battle of the history of the Cold War. This book looks at an event that forestalled any possibility of another Western force, international Social Democracy, from triumphing. Instead, the end of the Cold War led to the triumph of neoliberal capitalism known as globalisation