Swedish police use of criminal informants

Swedish police use of criminal informants is portrayed as a covert intelligence practice whose effectiveness depends on the same criminal identities and concealed arrangements that make it dangerous. The novel’s closing coda describes criminals being recruited to investigate serious crime, their backgrounds being fashioned from police information, and the authorities denying their service when an operation is exposed. The resulting secrecy does not stay confined to the informant: it can distort investigations and leave the person who supplied the intelligence to face the infiltrated organization alone.

Purpose and recruitment

The book describes the use of criminals as covert human intelligence sources as a longstanding police practice. Informants may be recruited while on remand or later, and the stated purpose is to investigate serious crime. The coda presents this as a response to the perceived limits of conventional intelligence methods: the police supervisory authority believes those methods are insufficient to combat organized crime and intends to continue developing covert human intelligence work.

That rationale carries a built-in tension. The informant is useful precisely because criminal experience can provide access and credibility, but the work places the informant inside the criminal world rather than outside it. In the novel’s account, the boundary between intelligence gathering and criminal activity is therefore not secure; the operation’s practical success can depend on information and conduct that the ordinary investigative record does not disclose.

Constructing a credible identity

The coda states that criminal informants have been given suitable personal backgrounds using the police criminal intelligence database and reports. It describes extensive doctoring of information as standard working practice. The method does not merely conceal an informant’s real role: it manufactures a record that can support the role the informant must perform.

Piet Hoffmann’s arrival in Aspsås Prison supplies a concrete example of how such credibility is staged and tested. Before the other prisoners returned to the unit, he chose a seat in the television corner where every prisoner would see him enter the social order. He deliberately occupied another prisoner’s favorite chair, took marked playing cards, and began solitaire without asking permission. These small provocations made his presence conspicuous and projected a newcomer who was not afraid to wait for approval or reveal his papers at the right moment.

The criminal persona was also prepared through records. Stefan Lygas and Karol Tomasz Penderecki had been telling prisoners for days that Hoffmann was coming and discussing his alleged offence, associates, and standing with an Eastern European mafia. Through Stefan’s lawyer, they obtained copies of his National Police Board criminal records, criminal intelligence database entries, prison records, and most recent judgment. The record number 721018-0010 identifies one of the documents used in that preparation. At supper, when two older prisoners demanded to see his papers, Hoffmann let them challenge him rather than allowing his allies to intervene. His identity had to survive scrutiny from inside the prison as well as from official records.

Secrecy, denial, and institutional handling

The policy described in the closing coda is one of cooperation denied and concealed. It states that other crimes have been marginalized in order to investigate serious crime, and that preliminary investigations and trials have consequently proceeded without the correct information. Secrecy thus reaches beyond protecting a source’s name: it can withhold facts relevant to the official account of cases and their outcomes.

An earlier episode shows the pressure such concealment can exert on ordinary institutional procedure. Before a City Police detective superintendent could question Hoffmann in G2, Aspsås Prison chief warden Lennart Oscarsson received a call from the general director instructing him to prevent the meeting, not just that day but the next as well. Oscarsson initially complied without asking why; when he later understood what had prompted the order, he recognized that it had rested on a lie. The scene presents the effort to keep a police investigator away from the informant as an active intervention, not simply an absence of disclosure.

The novel also distinguishes the official structure of prison authority from the concealed arrangements surrounding Hoffmann. When he sought solitary confinement, a prison official explained that voluntary isolation under Section 18 could be requested, whereas enforced solitary confinement under Section 50 was a separate decision made by prison authorities. That formal distinction could not itself secure Hoffmann’s safety. The institutional rules governing his placement and the undisclosed police operation around him operated at once, without giving him reliable protection from the consequences of exposure.

Exposure and the cost to the source

The coda describes the informant’s position after exposure in stark terms: authorities deny having used the source and look away while the infiltrated organization tries to resolve the problem. Hoffmann’s experience gives this policy a personal consequence. He realizes that one of the four men who had been his protection and his means of escape has betrayed him. What had helped sustain his cover now becomes evidence that his security has collapsed from within.

His precautions in the prison show how exposure turns ordinary routines into a survival calculation. At night, he checks the pillow beneath the covers, the chair positioned in the doorway, and a sock lodged between the door and its frame. Those improvised barriers give him only two and a half seconds if someone attacks at the time when guards cannot see or hear. The routine recurs from one day to the next; it is the bodily cost of remaining in a role whose official sponsors cannot safely acknowledge him.

Significance and the closing coda

The closing pages separate claims marked as fact from characters marked as fiction. They state that only criminals can play criminals, that police records have been used to construct credible backgrounds, and that extensive alteration of information has become standard practice. They also describe exposed criminal informants as outlaws whom the authorities deny having used. The coda names Ewert Grens, Sven Sundkvist, and Mariana Hermansson as fictional, distinguishing the story’s individual figures from the institutional practice it asserts.

That distinction sharpens the rule’s significance. The book does not present covert informant work as an isolated deception that ends when an operation ends: its account connects recruitment, fabricated records, concealed cooperation, distorted case proceedings, and abandonment after exposure. The informant’s apparent criminal identity is designed to persuade the organization being penetrated, while the official denial leaves that identity as the only one the source can rely on publicly. The practice can therefore generate intelligence and, at the same time, undermine the legal processes and personal protections on which its legitimacy would depend.