Gullberg had begun at the Russia desk of the third division of the state police, and after two years in the job had undertaken his first tentative field work in 1952 and 1953 as an Air Force attaché with the rank of captain at the embassy in Moscow. Strangely enough, he was following in the footsteps of another well-known spy. Some years earlier that post had been occupied by the notorious Colonel Wennerström.

Back in Sweden, Gullberg had worked in Counter-Espionage, and ten years later he was one of the younger security police officers who, working under Otto Danielsson, exposed Wennerström and eventually got him a life sentence for treason at Långholmen prison.

When the Security Police was reorganized under Per Gunnar Vinge in 1964 and became the Security Division of the National Police Board, or Swedish Internal Security – S.I.S. – the major increase in personnel began. By then Gullberg had worked at the Security Police for fourteen years, and had become one of its trusted veterans.

Gullberg had never used the designation “Säpo” for Säkerhetspolisen, the Security Police. He used the term “S.I.S.” in official contexts, and among colleagues he would also refer to “the Company” or “the Firm,” or merely “the Division” – but never “Säpo”. The reason was simple. The Firm’s most important task for many years was so-called personnel control, that is, the investigation and registration of Swedish citizens who might be suspected of harbouring communist or subversive views. Within the Firm the terms communist and traitor were synonymous. The later conventional use of the term “Säpo” was actually something that the potentially subversive communist publication Clarté had coined as a pejorative name for the communist-hunters within the police force. For the life of him Gullberg could never imagine why his former boss P.G. Vinge had entitled his memoirs Säpo Chief 1962-1970.

It was the reorganization of 1964 that had shaped Gullberg’s future career.

The designation S.I.S. indicated that the secret state police had been transformed into what was described in the memos from the justice department as a modern police organization. This involved recruiting new personnel and continual problems breaking them in. In this expanding organization “the Enemy” were presented with dramatically improved opportunities to place agents within the division. This meant in turn that internal security had to be intensified – the Security Police could no longer be a club of former officers, where everyone knew everyone else, and where the commonest qualification for a new recruit was that his father was or had been an officer.

In 1963 Gullberg was transferred from Counter-Espionage to personnel control, a role that took on added significance in the wake of Wennerström’s exposure as a double agent. During that period the foundation was laid for the “register of political opinions,” a list which towards the end of the ’60s amounted to around 300,000 Swedish citizens who were held to harbour undesirable political sympathies. Checking the backgrounds of Swedish citizens was one thing, but the crucial question was: how would security control within S.I.S. itself be implemented?

The Wennerström debacle had given rise to an avalanche of dilemmas within the Security Police. If a colonel on the defence staff could work for the Russians – he was also the government’s adviser on matters involving nuclear weapons and security policy – it followed that the Russians might have an equally senior agent within the Security Police. Who would guarantee that the top ranks and middle management at the Firm were not working for the Russians? Who, in short, was going to spy on the spies?

In August 1964 Gullberg was summoned to an afternoon meeting with the assistant chief of the Security Police, Hans Wilhelm Francke. The other participants at the meeting were two individuals from the top echelon of the Firm, the assistant head of Secretariat and the head of Budget. Before the day was over, Gullberg had been appointed head of a newly created division with the working title of “the Special Section”. The first thing he did was to rename it “Special Analysis”. That held for a few minutes until the head of Budget pointed out that S.A. was not much better than S.S. The organization’s final name became “the Section for Special Analysis,” the S.S.A., and in daily parlance “the Section,” to differentiate it from “the Division” or “the Firm,” which referred to the Security Police as a whole.

“The Section” was Francke’s idea. He called it “the last line of defence”. An ultra-secret unit that was given strategic positions within the Firm, but which was invisible. It was never referred to in writing, even in budget memoranda, and therefore it could not be infiltrated. Its task was to watch over national security. He had the authority to make it happen. He needed the Budget chief and the Secretariat chief to create the hidden substructure, but they were old colleagues, friends from dozens of skirmishes with the Enemy.

During the first year the Section consisted of Gullberg and three hand-picked colleagues. Over the next ten years it grew to include no more than eleven people, of whom two were administrative secretaries of the old school and the remainder were professional spy hunters. It was a structure with only two ranks. Gullberg was the chief. He would ordinarily meet each member of his team every day. Efficiency was valued more highly than background.

Formally, Gullberg was subordinate to a line of people in the hierarchy under the head of Secretariat of the Security Police, to whom he had to deliver monthly reports, but in practice he had been given a unique position with exceptional powers. He, and he alone, could decide to put Säpo’s top bosses under the microscope. If he wanted to, he could even turn Per Gunnar Vinge’s life inside out. (Which he also did.) He could initiate his own investigations or carry out telephone tapping without having to justify his objective or even report it to a higher level. His model was the legendary James Jesus Angleton, who had a similar position in the C.I.A., and whom he came to know personally.

The Section became a micro-organization within the Division – outside, above, and parallel to the rest of the Security Police. This also had geographical consequences. The Section had its offices at Kungsholmen, but for security reasons almost the whole team was moved out of police headquarters to an eleven-room apartment in Östermalm that had been discreetly remodelled into a fortified office. It was staffed twenty-four hours a day since the faithful old retainer and secretary Eleanor Badenbrink was installed in permanent lodgings in two of its rooms closest to the entrance. Badenbrink was an implacable colleague in whom Gullberg had implicit trust.

In the organization, Gullberg and his employees disappeared from public view – they were financed through a special fund, but they did not exist anywhere in the formal structure of the Security Police, which reported to the police commission or the justice department. Not even the head of S.I.S. knew about the most secret of the secret, whose task it was to handle the most sensitive of the sensitive.

At the age of forty Gullberg consequently found himself in a situation where he did not have to explain his actions to any living soul and could initiate investigations of anyone he chose.

It was clear to Gullberg that the Section for Special Analysis could become a politically sensitive unit and the job description was expressly vague. The written record was meagre in the extreme. In September 1964, Prime Minister Erlander signed a directive that guaranteed the setting aside of funds for the Section for Special Analysis, which was understood to be essential to the nation’s security. This was one of twelve similar matters which the assistant chief of S.I.S., Hans Wilhelm Francke, brought up during an afternoon meeting. The document was stamped top secret and filed in the special protocol of S.I.S.