Baab and Harkavy's book, 'In the Spider Web of the Secret Services: Why Were Olaf Palme, Uwe Barschel and William Colby Murdered?', takes aim at the CIA's suspected involvement in the officials' deaths. Based on secret documents from seven different intelligence agencies, conversations with former agents, toxicology reports, and consultations with experts, the book seeks answers to long-standing questions about who was responsible for what have become among the most high profile political death and suspected suicide cases of the 20th century.
Speaking to Sputnik Deutschland, Baab, a renowned television journalist in his native Germany, said that there was a common thread tying all three of the officials' deaths together.
"Uwe Barschel, Olof Palme and William Colby had something in common," Baab explained. "All three were involved in one way or another in international arms trade in the context of the Iran-Contra scandal, and connected in some way with the CIA and NATO's 'Stay Behind' secret army network." The Stay Behind network, designed to carry out resistance, assassination and provocation operations during the Cold War, would have been activated in case of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, or if far left parties ever came to power in democratic elections.
Barschel: From CIA Contacts to Mysterious Death
Christian Democratic Union (CDU) politician Uwe Barschel served as the head of the West German region of Schlewswig-Holstein from 1982 and 1987. On October 11, 1987, the politician was found dead in his hotel room in Geneva, Switzerland. The official version of his death said that he had committed suicide. Months earlier, in May 1987, Barschel had narrowly survived a plane crash. Theories have been floated over the decades saying that the politician was killed by Mossad.
In their investigation, Baab and Harkavy consulted with Heinrich Wille, the Lubeck prosecutor's office chief investigator investigating the Barschel case.
"This is simply unthinkable," Wille said, speaking at the book's presentation in Berlin last week. "The head of a German federal state dies abroad under unclear circumstances, and no one shows any interest in the matter. The official authorities hushed up the matter."
But the researcher did not give up. "I managed to find out that Barschel officially maintained contacts with the CIA. That is, not only in secret. He officially informed the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution [West Germany's domestic security agency] about his contacts with the CIA," Wille explained.Baab confirmed that the CIA had gotten to the politician when he was a young man. "After graduation, Barschel worked in a notary's office. Through this notary office, on the orders of the CIA, or at least with the agency's acquiescence, arms deals of a global scale were made." This included dealings connected to the Iran-Contra affair, a Reagan-era scandal involving the sale weapons from the US and its allies to Iran (Washington's sworn enemy) to help fund anti-government rebels in Nicaragua.
"We assume that that the CIA was involved in Barschel's death, and that the deat was in fact a murder," Baab said. The authors' evidence includes the fact that the doctor who first studied Barschel's body "had himself turned out to be a CIA double agent. This explains why the first conclusion from the results of the autopsy turned out to be incorrect." According to the journalist, new toxicological evidence shows that the German politician was in fact murdered.
Palme: Victim of NATO's Secret 'Stay Behind' Program?
On the night of February 28, 1986, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was assassinated in central Stockholm. In the thirty years since, a wide number of theories have circulated about who was behind the murder.