EYE SPY INTELLIGENCE MAGAZINE 79 20126

Cold War Spy DiesConvicted KGB spy goes to his grave

still protesting his innocencene of Sweden’s mostnotorious Cold Warspies has died in Stockholm, following ayear-long battle withO

cancer. Bertil Stroberg, an airforce officer, was convicted ofoffering his services to the KGB inthe early 1980s, but was undone

after a letter he had written to anofficial at the Polish Embassy wasintercepted and its content read.

The hand-written letter was signedby a Sven Roland Larsson andexplained that he had access tomilitary secrets he was willing todivulge for money. If the KGB, via its friends at the embassy, agreedto the espionage, they were tosend a cash retainer to the CentralPost Office in Stockholm.Immediately a watch was kept onLarsson’s mail box at the post office, and Stroberg was subse-quently arrested when he asked ifthere was any mail for a “MrLarsson.” At the time, his solicitor,Ulla Jacobsson, said: “There is nodirect evidence that my client had written the letter to the embassy,nor that he had delivered it.”

For his part Stroberg denied hewas a spy and claimed he was the“unwitting victim of a conspiracy.” He said he had merely gone tocollect mail on behalf of a friend.In 1983, the court rejected hisversion of events and jailed himfor six years of which he servedjust three.

In 2009, following a new televi-sion documentary about the case,

evidence was presented that castdoubt on the handwriting in theletter being that of Stroberg. Thisprompted the Swede to demand aretrial, but his appeal was rejectedby the High Court.

Stroberg’s wife, Marianne, whohas always supported hisinnocence, said that decisiondisheartened him immensely,“draining all his powers.”

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wo incredibly important70-year-old typed andhandwritten papers byBritish WWII codebreakerAlan Turing on the theory

LEGACY OF ALAN TURINGSecret Papers of the Greatest Codebreaker

Tof code-breaking, have beenreleased into the public domain bythe UK communications spy agency- GCHQ. Turing, who committedsuicide after the war, wrote thepapers whilst working at BletchleyPark - the country’s central wartimecode-breaking centre.

The National Archives released thepapers to coincide with the birth ofTuring, which were accurately dated

because one file references Hitler’sage. They were headed: ‘TheApplications of Probability to Crypt’,and ‘Paper on the Statistics ofRepetitions’. Both examine code-

breaking methods and mathematicalequations used to tackle trickyenciphered codes used by theNazis.

GCHQ said the papers weredeclassified because the Servicehad secured their meaning and“squeezed the juice” out of them.The papers were written by Turingwhilst he worked at the code-breaking centre - Bletchley Park.

Turing, who committed suicide in1954 by cyanide poisoning, lived ina room on the huge site (see left). Itwas his work that paved the way forthe modern computer.

Turing’s apartment at Bletchley Park

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan govern-ment officials have sacked the doctor who helped the CIA traceOsama bin-Laden in Abbottabad.Dr Shakeel Afridi and over a dozenother members of staff whoworked at a health department in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province,were sacked for “organising anunauthorised polio campaign inAbbottabad.” It was under theprovisions of this programme thatAfridi allegedly worked to provideassistance in the CIA investigation to trace bin-Laden.

Doctor whohelped CIA find

Osama bin-Ladenis sacked

Alan Turing

Dr Shakeel Afridi

Old Central Post Office,Stockholm

Bertil Stroberg

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