Government decides to protect and deploy Paula in secret

The government’s decision to protect and deploy Paula turns a contested undercover operation into a prison infiltration: Paula is to be arrested on a drug-possession charge, placed in Aspsås Prison, and secretly protected by a confidential humanitarian pardon. The plan gives Erik Wilson’s deeply embedded source a route into Wojtek’s expanding prison network, but its promise of protection is sharply qualified. The operation depends on keeping Paula useful, keeping his true status concealed, and persuading officials to accept risks they do not fully trust.

The decision and its stakes

The dispute is framed around whether Paula should be allowed to continue. The state secretary weighs the operation against the danger of using criminals as infiltrators, arguing that such sources must be treated as high risk. The question is not merely whether the state will tolerate Paula’s past conduct: Wilson seeks immunity connected to Västmannagatan so that Paula can work from inside Wojtek without that exposure disabling the mission. The state secretary’s refusal to trust either Wilson or Paula makes the proposed protection uncertain from the outset.

Wilson counters that Paula is not a peripheral source but Wojtek’s route into Sweden and the center of an organization already expanding. As Paula’s handler, Wilson says he works with him daily and trusts him; he argues that no infiltrator has previously been positioned so centrally in an expanding organization. In his view, allowing Paula to operate fully from within could let the authorities dismantle the network in one stroke. The exchange over whether Chief Superintendent Göransson recently searched Paula underscores the tension between the operation’s dependence on the source and the suspicion surrounding him.

The state secretary looks out at the capital carrying on with its ordinary afternoon while decisions are made that its inhabitants cannot see. Her return with Pål Larsen, the director general, signals the turn from argument to action. After nineteen minutes, she tells the waiting participants that she has made her decision and that Larsen will help with what comes next. The decision is therefore presented not as a public policy announcement but as a confidential, practical commitment by senior officials.

The arrangement for Aspsås

Larsen’s task is to place Paula in Aspsås Prison to serve the sentence expected after an arrest for possessing three kilos of amphetamine. The proposed charge supplies the mechanism for entry: Paula is to appear to be an ordinary prisoner convicted of a serious drug offence, while the actual purpose of his imprisonment is to infiltrate Wojtek’s prison operation. Larsen immediately identifies the likely obstacle. A sentence of that length would ordinarily send Paula first to Kumla, a holding prison, before transfer. The plan rejects that normal sequence, making placement at Aspsås a deliberate operational requirement rather than a routine consequence of sentencing.

The protection offered in the meeting is specific in form but not a broad guarantee of safety. The state secretary agrees that Paula will officially be pardoned on humanitarian grounds. Medical or humanitarian grounds can support the decision, which the Ministry of Justice will stamp confidential. Hoffmann insists on hearing exactly what is being guaranteed before he leaves; the reply addresses the pardon, while the operation’s physical and institutional dangers remain. Confidentiality is both the instrument that protects the undercover identity and a limit on how openly the state can acknowledge its responsibility.

The meeting’s atmosphere also makes secrecy a physical problem. As Hoffmann heads for the door, he discovers that the microphone has come loose and slipped between his leg and his trousers. He says nothing, then raises his middle finger as he leaves; the others’ averted eyes and irritation help him avoid questions about what is being dragged behind him. The incident does not alter the decision, but it places a concealed recording device alongside the concealed operation: the meeting is meant to stay hidden, even as its participants’ words may outlast the room.

From authorization to prison entry

The decision becomes concrete when Hoffmann enters Aspsås Prison for the first time. He has studied the buildings from the church tower and learned about the people and corridors in Block G with Wilson’s help while on remand, but the prison’s gates and registration procedures are no longer a map or briefing. He arrives in leg irons under close guard, is searched, issued prison clothes, and waits in a sterile room. Ten days later, he has spent twenty-three hours of each day alone in a five-square-metre cell, with no visitors, newspapers, television, or radio. The operation has secured his placement, but the placement subjects him to the prison’s control of movement, information, and contact.

When Hoffmann is allowed into the unit, he learns its routines from the principal officer, including where to use the toilet and why lock-in is at seven thirty. He then chooses the TV corner before the other prisoners return. Having studied photographs and backgrounds of the fifteen men in the unit, he makes himself visible in a seat and at a table already associated with someone else, rather than waiting to be invited or approved. The decision to put him inside Aspsås thus requires more than a formal transfer: he must establish a credible prisoner identity through his conduct among the people whose trust, hostility, and judgments govern daily life there.

Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki are already positioned to help him. They are members of Wojtek serving long sentences at Aspsås, and the operation expects them to help remove the competing dealers and take over the prison drug market. Their role is double-edged: if Paula is exposed, they may also become his executioners. They have prepared the ground by speaking about his arrival and obtaining copies of his criminal and prison records, including his judgment, through Stefan’s lawyer. At supper, two older prisoners demand to see Hoffmann’s papers. He lets Stefan and Karol Tomasz hold back while he handles the challenge himself, using the encounter to establish standing among the prisoners rather than relying openly on his allies.

The cost of the decision

The operation’s early progress confirms both its reach and its risk. Hoffmann reports that he has taken down the three main dealers in Aspsås with forty-two grams of manufactured amphetamine, while reports reach Warsaw and the next stage begins. Yet his protection in the unit is only as dependable as the channels around him. At night he arranges a pillow, chair, and sock at his cell door as a crude warning system, reckoning that an attack might come during the brief period when staff cannot see or hear. The formally authorized mission is therefore accompanied by constant private preparation for the possibility that the institution will not protect him in time.

When Hoffmann believes he is about to be exposed, he seeks voluntary isolation, the available way to escape immediate danger without escaping the prison. Ten members of the prison riot squad escort him from Block G to the isolation unit in Block C; six remain behind to deter further violence, while four escort him. He understands the move as a means of survival, but it also marks a reversal: the operation that placed him among the prisoners now depends on transferring him away from them.

The threat is not only an inference. In isolation, Hoffmann recognizes that one of the four people he had counted on for protection has burned him. At the same time, the original secret arrangement reaches into prison administration. The director general tells Lennart Oscarsson that Ewert Grens must not be allowed to meet Hoffmann in G2, without explaining why. Oscarsson initially receives the instruction without understanding it; later, he identifies it as a lie and refuses to carry out a further order to move Hoffmann back, insisting that the order be executed by the person giving it. The government’s decision has put Paula inside the prison, but the effort to keep the operation concealed creates instructions that implicate prison officials and expose the gap between official protection and the prisoner’s actual safety. Its decisive consequence is thus double: it enables the infiltration of Wojtek’s prison network while binding Paula’s survival to a secretive chain of promises, transfers, and obedience that may fail him.