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Did Raoul Wallenberg try to leave Budapest in January 1945 with jewelry and 15–20 kg of gold hidden in the gasoline tank of his car? On sensationalism in popular history and Soviet disinformation
Abstract
This article addresses the claim made by the American journalists Frederick Werbell and Thurston Clarke (in 1982) and the Swedish author and researcher Bengt Jangfeldt (in 2012) to the effect that the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, when preparing to leave Budapest for Debrecen in January 1945, hid jewelry and 15–20 kg of gold in his car. As is evident from the examination conducted here, the testimonies referred to in support of this theory are all fraught with serious problems. Most importantly, there is not a single witness making such a claim before the July 1947 issue of the American journal Reader’s Digest, where it first appeared. The article concludes that the sources referred to are not sufficiently solid to support the claim that Wallenberg tried to bring anything of value out of Budapest, except for the small number of bills of different currencies that was handed over to his relatives by the KGB in 1989, together with his personal belongings. The article also describes a number of known and suspected Soviet attempts to furnish the Swedes with disinformation regarding Wallenberg’s fate and discusses whether the gold-and-jewelry claim is in fact the distant echo of an almost 70-year-old Soviet attempt to discredit Wallenberg.
Russia, as many contemporary states, takes public diplomacy seriously. Since the inception of its English language TV network Russia Today in 2005 (now ‘RT’), the Russian government has broadened its operations to include Sputnik news websites in several languages and social media activities. Moscow, however, has also been accused of engaging in covert influence activities – behaviour historically referred to as ‘active measures’ in the Soviet KGB lexicon on political warfare. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence on how Russia since 2014 has moved towards a preference for active measures towards Sweden, a small country in a geopolitically important European region. We analyse the blurring of boundaries between public diplomacy and active measures; document phenomena such as forgeries, disinformation, military threats and agents of influence and define Russian foreign policy strategy. In summary, we conclude that the overarching goal of Russian policy towards Sweden and the wider Baltic Sea is to preserve the geostrategic status quo, which is identified with a security order minimising NATO presence in the region.
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