In the last episode created by Henning Mankell for the iconic sleuth of the post-Soviet world, Kurt Wallander is sent out on his most surprising trail of discovery.. (No, we won’t tell you how we know there will be no sequels this time – learn to read Swedish or be patient and wait for the translation.) In the complicated unravelling of the plot behind the plot that culminated in the grounding of a Soviet submarine right in front of Sweden’s supposedly most secure naval base (It was discovered by a mink farmer out for a walk), the presumed Russian spy turns out to have been a spy for the United States. Anyone who has been in Sweden’s top-secret military information office (my brother and I walked in by mistake while looking for a washroom) will have noticed that on the top-secret maps pinned to the walls, all the theoretical invasion threats were indicated by arrows coming from the east. Neutral, non-Nato Sweden apparently had no fears about threats from the west or the south.
So what kind of fantasy trip was Mankell on with this story of an American threat? Nutty Swedish paranoia, no doubt, the US didn’t spy on its supposed allies, not to mention its real NATO allies like the dastardly Russians would be expected to do, would they? Well, recent events in the Foreign Affairs office of Germany’s hapless foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle suggest the opposite. Wikileaks has provided ample reason for the governments of supposedly friendly nations to raise alarm flags on all fronts with regard to the arrogance of leaders of a country that is not exactly prospering at the moment. The German-speaking countries – Germany, Switzerland and Austria – are not going to forget what these gunslingers said to each other about them though they will deny being overly offended. And the US ambassador to Germany, Philip Murphy, will have to be recalled for the actions of his office overstep the line of what is acceptable for an embassy enjoying the privilege of a foreign government on somebody else’s turf. For, as is now known, the US embassy was receiving information from in-camera meetings of the German Foreign Office through an informant who was sitting at the table, or rather behind it, listening carefully and taking notes that he then passed on to someone at the US Embassy. The German government seems to be avoiding calling the informer, Westerwelle’s chief of staff Helmut Metzner a spy (“Spion”), preferring “Informer” (Informant) because they are still not certain who it was who put him up to this, or if he was, rather incredibly, simply acting on his own. Whatever the truth on that turns out to be, the Germans will certainly never again say a word in confidence to US ambassador Murphy, who accepted this supposedly secret information without informing the Germans of the offence. Spiegel Magazine headlines the articles on the Wikileaks and spy scandal disclosures “Time for Apologies”. For Germans the whole miserable story reminds them all too easily of the tale of Gunter Guillaume, right hand man of Prime Minister Willy Brandt, who was a spy for the DDR and ended Brandt’s rule. It’s certainly not quite the same, but it’s also not that different and it will bring an icy period in German-US relations unless the Obama government does some intelligent fence-mending, something they have not proven very good at up till now.