Secret intelligence reports and the two-track truth of official investigations

Secret intelligence reports and official investigations are two parallel records of the same criminal cases, but they do not carry equal information into the justice system. As Ewert Grens explains to prosecutor Lars Ågestam, the secret reports preserve facts that official investigations were never given. When those facts concern police informants and crimes concealed to protect them, the divide does more than hide evidence: it can determine which crime is investigated, who is prosecuted, and whether a judgment reflects what actually happened.

Two records of the same cases

Grens describes an official investigation as the kind of case file he and Ågestam ordinarily handle. Alongside it sits another record, made up of secret intelligence reports available to police management. The distinction is not simply between public and confidential paperwork. The reports contain information about what actually happened that investigators working on the official case did not know and therefore could not present. The two files may concern the same underlying events, yet the official account is incomplete by design or through institutional withholding.

Grens stresses that the secret reports contain the truth the others were never told. Some crimes, he says, were swept aside so that other crimes could be solved. The resulting arrangement makes concealment part of the investigative method: an informant’s offending may be covered up or downplayed in order to preserve that person’s usefulness in another inquiry. The official case can therefore appear to advance while depending on facts withheld from the very people responsible for building it.

What the figures expose

The scale becomes concrete when Ågestam prints 302 secret intelligence reports from the county police commissioner’s laptop overnight. He compares the first 100 he examines with the city police investigations. Twenty-five of those cases had ended without prosecution, thirty-five in acquittals, and forty in judgments. These figures describe Ågestam’s review of 100 reports, not a final accounting of all 302; the distinction matters because his examination is still under way.

For the forty cases that resulted in judgments, Ågestam concludes that the decisions were wrong because the underlying information had been missing. People were sentenced, but, in his assessment, for the wrong crime. The problem is thus not confined to cases abandoned or defendants acquitted. A conviction and sentence may stand in the official record even when the secret account changes the meaning of the conduct tried. The two-track system can produce outcomes at every stage—non-prosecution, acquittal, or judgment—without giving the formal process the information needed to establish what it is actually judging.

Informants and compromised prosecution

The reports also connect the information gap to particular prosecutions. Grens tells Ågestam that he was involved in twenty-three cases in which he prosecuted unsuccessfully. Ågestam had closed them without the information contained in the secret report, information Grens says would have exposed or implicated the informant. The disclosure places the prosecutor inside the consequences of the system without establishing that he knew the hidden account at the time: his official work proceeded on a record from which decisive material had been withheld.

Ågestam names the broader contradiction plainly in his response to Grens. Criminals work for the police; their own crimes are covered up or minimized; one crime is treated as legitimate so another can be investigated; and police officers lie to, or withhold the truth from, other officers. His outrage is directed not only at informants’ criminal conduct but at the institutional choices that make that conduct usable. The secret reports show that the benefit of an informant’s cooperation can be bought by compromising the investigation meant to deal with the informant’s own crime.

The archive enters the present

When Grens later puts a document before Ågestam, he identifies the 302 reports as accounts of events unavailable to the rest of the investigators. The exchange shifts the reports from a concealed archive into the immediate work of examining and responding to that archive. Grens also points to a copy that is still warm. Against the larger collection from the previous year, that detail suggests the issue is not safely closed in the past: a document is physically present in the room, and the exchange continues around it.

The reports function as a counter-record, but their existence does not by itself repair the official cases they contradict. Ågestam has reviewed only 100 of the 302, and his findings already unsettle the apparent finality of dismissals, acquittals, and judgments. The concept’s central force lies in that discrepancy: the official investigation claims to record and resolve a case, while a hidden account may preserve information that changes what the case was about. The truth exists, but in a form withheld from the ordinary process charged with establishing it.