NCJ Number
91783
Date Published
1982
Length
29 pages
Annotation
This account of Operation Leo, a plan to kidnap a former Minister of the Interior in Sweden during early 1977 and trade her for the release of Andreas Baader and other terrorists held in German prisons, attributes its near success to Sweden's climate of disaffection with law and State, its socialist culture, and general leftist sympathies.
Abstract
Materials for this study were records compiled by Stockholm's District Court after the terrorist plan was aborted and its leaders arrested. The paper first discusses the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group, its ties with the Socialist Patients' Collective, and the personal history of Norbert Kroecher who masterminded Operation Leo. It then describes the buildup of the hardcore Kroecher group in Sweden: Anna-Karin Lindgren, Kroecher's Swedish mistress; Lennart Warting and Pia Lasker, also Swedes; Armando Carillo, a Latin American-Marxist revolutionary; Alan Hunter, a British citizen with numerous contacts among international terrorist groups; and a mysterious German, Manfred Adometi. This group experienced certain convulsions, caused largely by conflicts between the locals and the foreigners. The first event was the December 1976 purging of Anna-Karin Lindgren by the non-Swedes and the second a January 1977 rebellion by the Swedes, particularly the women, against Kroecher and his plan. Language difficulties severely impeded decisionmaking within the group. Moreover, Kroecher was a man of action and planning with little concern for political philosophies. He worked in a conspiratorial way, not revealing all the plan's details at once. Nevertheless, Kroecher succeeded in staying underground in Germanophobic Sweden for 5 years, helped by Swedish middle-class intellectuals, and set up very advanced plans for a dangerous operation that threatened the Swedish Government.