Finish security police declassify early Cold War archive

Suojelupoliisi, Finland’s security police (otherwise known as SUPO), declassified today segments of its Cold War counterintelligence archives. The declassified archives include the entirety of its 1949 document collection, as well as archive indexes for the decade 1949-1959. It is the first time that SUPO has made internal documents available to the public. The 1949 archive is important because it marks the beginning of SUPO’s intense monitoring of Soviet intelligence operations in Finland, and of activities of the Communist Party of Finland, forerunner of today’s Communist Party of Finland (Unity). Researchers are eagerly awaiting the release of SUPO files from the 1960s. In the early part of that decade, major segments of SUPO files were “lost” while being “re-arranged“. The “lost” files include the so-called “X-reports”, which are said to detail “particularly sensitive” counterintelligence operations. [IA]