Intelligence officer who forged credentials did not betray secrets, says Sweden
January 24, 2020 2 Comments
A man who rose through the ranks of the Swedish Armed Forces by using forged credentials, and worked as an intelligence officer in NATO while liaising with the Russian security services, did not betray national secrets, according to Swedish officials.
The man, who has not been named by the Swedish government, served in the Försvars- makten —the Swedish Armed Forces— for 18 years. He used forged certificates to claim that he had a university degree in political science. He also claimed that he had successfully completed the Swedish Army’s officer training program, a claim that he supported with a forged certificate of completion.
During his military career, he participated in Sweden’s international peacekeeping missions in Kosovo, as well as in Afghanistan, where he served with the rank of major. Between 2007 and 2010, and then again in 2013, the unnamed man was an employee of the Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Service (MUST), where he worked as a liaison between MUST and Russia’s Federal Security Service.
In 2012 he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and was dispatched to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, which is the headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Allied Command Operations. Sweden is not a member of NATO but has close ties with the alliance. While in Belgium, the unnamed man joined the Afghanistan Mission Network, an intelligence-sharing platform for nations that participated in military and peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan. He then joined Sweden’s United Nations peacekeeping mission in Mali as its chief of staff, with the rank of major.
The forgeries that he used to join the military were reportedly detected in 2019, but the case did not become public until earlier this month, when the Stockholm-based newspaper Dagens Nyheter published an claimed about it. On Thursday, the chief of staff of the Försvarsmakten, General Micael Byden, told the Defense Committee of the Swedish Parliament that the unnamed man did not harm Sweden’s national security. General Byden briefed the committee on the results of an internal investigation into the case by the armed forces. He claimed that the investigation had found “nothing that indicates that classified information had been disseminated” to Russia or any other foreign power by the unnamed man. NATO has not commented on the case.
► Author: Ian Allen | Date: 24 January 2020 | Permalink
intelNews.org 
Taken at face value, this would seem to suggest that specific credentials are of less significance than apparent for intelligence work. In concrete terms, Swedish CI sucks.
Like many he did not foresee the Internet. Wonder how many false credentials made peoples career before that, they were smart but without the skill of precognition.