It now appears certain that Sweden and Finland will join NATO. Below is a look at early Cold War agent infiltrations into the Soviet Union--in particular the Baltics:
By the middle of July 1945, 21,300 Estonian, 3,400 Latvian, and 300 Lithuanian refugees were in Sweden. Another 6,500 Swedish-speaking Estonians had been evacuated in different waves during the war.
Most of the refugees arrived in small boats that on a more or less commercial basis were trafficking the war-ridden sea, with peaks in August-October 1944 (Estonia and Latvia except Kurzeme) and February-May 1945 (Kurzeme). Some of them, probably about 1100-1500, came with boats that were financed by the Swedish Defence Command for intelligence tasks
The Swedish Defense Command has largely burnt the archives that could have given a precise account of this, but from what we know of the intelligence traffic that between 1947-1957 was pursued for intelligence reasons by British, American, and Swedish authorities we can establish that both convinced Nazis and ardent democrats were among the Baltic volunteers.
In order to prepare their own program of infiltration into the Soviet Union, the intelligence corps of the Swedish Army renewed its contacts among the Balts in Sweden already in 1947. Seen from a national security perspective, the Soviet Baltic republics remained an area of specific interest especially for the military leadership in Sweden, as they hosted a large concentration of heavily armed Red Army units in considerable proximity to Swedish territorial waters.
Thus, a secret training program was set up, whose aim it was to organise the selection, education and smuggling of potential infiltrators recruited among the Balts in Sweden. Inside the Soviet Union, they were supposed to establish a network of informants, who would organise the transmission of relevant information of particular political and military interest to Sweden via radio communication. These activities were conducted in close consultation with the British SIS, which was closely involved in the infiltration of Soviet territories by émigré spies.
The key figure among the Estonians in Sweden was the former officer Arkadi Valdin, who, as his Latvian and Lithuanian counterparts, was a direct subordinate of Thede Palm, the head of the secret intelligence unit of the Swedish military. Valdin had his own contacts among the agents of the SIS and, most probably, also the CIA, and was responsible for the educational training of the selected candidates in a Stockholm suburb as well as the coordination of their clandestine passage to Soviet Estonia.
The Baltic operatives that managed to land on the Soviet coastline were either immediately killed or imprisoned, while others were turned into double agents, who after their conversion actively engaged in the KGB’s misinforming operations. After a failed evacuation effort, which resulted in the death of all involved agents that were supposed to leave Soviet Estonia for Sweden in September 1951, the Swedish intelligence service completely withdrew from the infiltration operations.
Text Source; Lars Fredrik Stöcker, Bridging the Baltic Sea. Networks of Resistance and Opposition during the Cold War Era. The Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series, ed. Mark Kramer. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2018.
Map Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Baltic_Sea_map.png/800px-Baltic_Sea_map.png
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