Police informant system (CHIS)

The Police informant system (CHIS) is a form of law enforcement built on people who move between criminal networks and police investigations. In the novel, its defining bargain is stark: a criminal may commit offenses that authorities overlook because the information helps them address other crimes. The arrangement can produce access that ordinary policing cannot, but it also creates a gray zone in which accountability, protection, and the informant’s identity are all unstable.

Definition and Operating Logic

The system’s most direct explanation comes from Ågestam, who describes an informant as a criminal whose crimes are overlooked because the person is helping the police deal with other crimes. This is not simply a confidential witness relationship. The informant’s usefulness depends on operating within criminal activity, while the authorities’ response to that activity is shaped by its intelligence value. The resulting arrangement blurs the distinction between investigating crime and enabling the conditions in which it occurs.

That logic is made concrete through Piet Hoffmann’s prison infiltration. On arrival at Aspsås Prison, he deliberately takes a visible place in the television corner, sits in another prisoner’s preferred chair, and begins playing with that prisoner’s marked cards. He wants the other inmates to see someone who does not hide or wait for permission to establish himself. His performance is an operational necessity: his credibility depends on being accepted within the prison’s informal order, not merely on possessing an officially assigned identity.

The prison operation also depends on advance preparation and criminal connections. Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki, fellow members of Wojtek serving long sentences at Aspsås Prison, have already discussed Hoffmann’s arrival, his alleged offense, his associates, and his standing with an Eastern European mafia. Through Stefan’s lawyer, they obtain records from the National Police Board criminal-record and criminal-intelligence databases, prison records, and Hoffmann’s most recent judgment. The cover is therefore not sustained by Hoffmann’s conduct alone; records and intermediaries help make the identity legible to the people whose acceptance he needs.

Criminal Credibility and Exposure

Hoffmann’s position is dangerous precisely because the criminal role has to work. He has been placed among prisoners who can help him displace the existing drug dealers, but the same men who assist that operation may become his executioners if they discover that he is Paula, the undercover identity connected to the wider criminal organization. His allies and his threat are not separate groups: the protection that gives him access also places his life in their hands.

The operation advances through measurable criminal activity. Hoffmann has felled the three principal dealers at Aspsås Prison with forty-two grams of amphetamine manufactured at thirty-percent purity. The reports required for the next stage have reached Warsaw and the deputy chief executive. Yet operational progress does not mean personal safety. Hoffmann’s precautions remain immediate and physical: he presses his back against a wall and checks the pillow under the covers, a chair in the doorway, and a sock wedged between the door and its frame. Those improvised safeguards buy only two and a half seconds if an attacker knows when to strike, during the part of the day when guards cannot see or hear.

The protection fails from within the circle. Hoffmann realizes that one of the four people he had counted on has burned him. The revelation reverses the meaning of his support network: a person or group that had functioned as protection and a route to escape can also expose him. In a system where an informant must be accepted as a criminal, exposure is not merely the loss of secrecy. It removes the conditions that made the operation survivable.

Secrecy, Authority, and Legal Boundaries

The system’s secrecy reaches beyond the prison. Lennart Oscarsson, the chief warden at Aspsås Prison, is told by a general director that Ewert Grens, a detective superintendent from the city police, must not be allowed to question Hoffmann in G2. The instruction applies immediately and beyond that day. Oscarsson initially does not ask why; only later does he recognize the source of his growing anger as a lie. The restriction shows how an operation can be shielded through orders delivered to officials who are not given the reason for them.

Inside the prison, Hoffmann asserts his right to make a telephone call, specifying his lawyer, non-custodial services, the police, and his five approved numbers. His appeal to formal rights sits beside a system that has already made his circumstances dependent on concealed arrangements. A similar distinction appears when prison staff explain that his move to the unit was made under Section 18, voluntary isolation, while solitary confinement under Section 50 is enforced and cannot be requested by an individual prisoner. The rules define different forms of separation, but neither resolves the immediate danger he perceives among prisoners who can still move around the unit.

The limits on state power are also stated during the prison crisis. When Ewert Grens demands armed-forces assistance, John Edvardson explains that the armed forces cannot be used for police matters and invokes the ordinance on support for civil activities by the Swedish Armed Forces, including Paragraph 7. This exchange is not a description of CHIS procedure, but it places the informant operation within a broader landscape of legal boundaries: officials may rely on secrecy and discretion, yet their authority remains formally divided and constrained.

Institutional Cost and Wider Development

The costs of the system become explicit when Ågestam considers the evidence of official misconduct. He says it could support prosecutions of police officers involved in forged documents, fake certificates, and the provocation of crimes, and argues that the material warrants a separate police unit at Aspsås Prison. He also points to the consequence for the justice process: trials, interviews, and judgments have been conducted without those involved knowing that police leadership was already party to the underlying arrangements. The problem is therefore not confined to an informant’s individual exposure; concealed police involvement can compromise the institutions that are supposed to establish responsibility.

The system is also presented as an expanding field of professional practice. Erik Wilson is at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Georgia to continue an advanced infiltration course interrupted when Paula contacted him about a buyer in Västmannagatan who had paid with a Polish bullet to the head. Wilson describes cooperation between Swedish, European, and American police organizations as essential to developing CHIS work, and the American center as a place with a strong tradition of relevant knowledge. His training gives the practice an international and institutional future, even as the operation involving Paula demonstrates the personal vulnerability built into it.

Wilson tells Sven Sundkvist that informants occupy the gray zone between criminals and the people investigating crime. He also calls covert human intelligence a growth area and says more informants will be needed. The forecast sharpens the novel’s central contradiction: the system is expected to expand because it offers useful access, while its methods make criminal conduct, police responsibility, and personal protection difficult to keep distinct. The informant is valuable because he can cross the boundary; that same crossing makes it easier for institutions to use him, conceal him, or abandon him when the boundary becomes dangerous.