Ян Гийю: шведский писатель и журналист-расследователь

French Swedish author and journalist

Jan Oskar Sverre Lucien Henri Guillou (, ɡiju; born 17 January 1944) is a French Swedish author and journalist. Guillou's fame in Sweden was established during his time as an investigative journalist, most notably in 1973 when he and co reporter Peter Bratt exposed a secret and illegal intelligence organization in Sweden, Informationsbyrån (IB). He is still active within journalism as a column writer for the Swedish evening tabloid Aftonbladet. Among his books are a series of spy fiction novels about a spy named Carl Hamilton, and a trilogy(+) of historical fiction novels about a Knight Templar, Arn Magnusson. He is the owner of one of the largest publishing companies in Sweden, Piratförlaget (Pirate Publishing), together with his wife, publisher Ann Marie Skarp, and Liza Marklund.

Guillou was born in Södertälje, Stockholm County, Sweden. His Breton Swedish father, Charles Guillou (1922–2020), came to Sweden in 1941 as the son of a member of the French Resistance and head of the offices of Free France in Stockholm, His mother, Marianne (née Botolfsen; 1922–2013), was of Norwegian descent. Guillou acquired French citizenship at birth and became a Swedish citizen in 1975. When Guillou's paternal grandfather was offered a position at the French embassy in Helsinki, Finland, his father decided to move with him and settled there. Guillou grew up with his mother and her new husband in Saltsjöbaden and Näsbypark outside of Stockholm. He finished his studentexamen (upper secondary final examination) from the boarding school Viggbyholmsskolan, located in Viggbyholm, in 1964.

Guillou first lived together with author and translator Marina Stagh, with whom he has two children, Dan (born 1970) and Ann Linn (born 1972) Guillou. His daughter Ann Linn, a journalist and feminist commentator, lives in a civil union with Sandra Andersson, daughter of film director Roy Andersson. He also has a country residence in Flybo, Östhammar Municipality, northern Roslagen, where he lives when he writes his books.

In 1973, Folket i Bild/Kulturfront, a left wing magazine, published a series of articles written by Guillou and Peter Bratt, revealing a Swedish secret intelligence agency called Informationsbyrån ("The Information Bureau" or IB for short). The articles, based on information initially furnished by former IB employee Håkan Isacson,

The exposure of the IB in the magazine, which included headshots with names and social security numbers of some of the alleged staff published under the headline "Spies", led to a major domestic political scandal known as the "IB affair" (IB affären). The activities ascribed to this secret outfit and its alleged ties to the Swedish Social Democratic Party were denied by Prime Minister Olof Palme, Defense Minister Sven Andersson and the Supreme Commander of the Swedish Armed Forces, General Stig Synnergren. However, later investigations by various journalists and by a public commissions, as well as autobiographies by the persons involved, have confirmed some of the activities described by Bratt and Guillou. In 2002, the public commission published a 3,000 page report where research about the IB affair was included. Guillou, Peter Bratt and Håkan Isacson were all arrested, tried in camera (behind closed doors) and convicted of espionage. According to Bratt, the verdict required some stretching of established judicial practice on the part of the court since none of them were accused of having acted in collusion with a foreign power. After one appeal Guillou's sentence was reduced from one year to 10 months. Guillou and Bratt served part of their sentence in solitary cells. Guillou was kept first at Långholmen Prison in central Stockholm and later at Österåker Prison north of the capital.

In 1976, two employees of Sveriges Radio contacted Guillou at Folket i Bild/Kulturfront with a story of a colleague that had been recruited by a CIA officer in Stockholm. They had earlier been turned down by a major newspaper, and now asked the journalist that had exposed IB if he could publish the story. The three worked out a scenario where the CIA recruiter could be legally accused of espionage, and instructed the recruit to collect evidence thereof. Unbelievably enough, the CIA officer agreed to give his spy written instructions of what information to retrieve, so the informal counter intelligence group had only to stockpile these, take photographs of the two spies meeting, and discuss how much they needed before the final exposure would be made. The recruited spy was at a later meeting instructed to go to Angola with orders to get information about both military and political conditions. The legally experienced within the group advised their double agent not to agree, but he went anyway. Afterwards, the group assembled to write a false report about the conditions in the civil war ridden country. Before the three could finalize the entire story for publishing, the spy went to Angola a second time, now with additional tasks on his instruction sheet. After the spy had returned to Sweden, Guillou in advance placed the article in a major newspaper and with a television news editor. He also contacted the Foreign Department in order to prevent official denials, and discuss the repercussions of the espionage exposure. The published article was a true 'scoop', and the CIA spy handler was ordered to leave Sweden together with a colleague. The spy himself avoided prosecution thanks to the article's portrayal of him as a rather heroic journalist, exposing foreign illegal operations to the public. Afterwards, both he and Guillou were interrogated by the Swedish Security Service, but for assumed political reasons, no criminal charges were made.

During a five year period starting in 1967, Guillou had a series of meetings with KGB representatives. In October 2009, the Swedish news tabloid Expressen told this story under the headline "Guillou secret agent for Soviet Union". The Swedish security service Säpo at the time knew of the contacts from Guillou's colleague Arne Lemberg, who suspected the activities could be illegal. One of the journalists who wrote the articles later commented that he believed Guillou's explanation, "I do not doubt one word of what he has said". Guillou received payment from KGB for written reports on Swedish politics, and Expressen points to this fact when defending its choice to refer to Guillou as a secret agent. Former KGB Colonel and defector Sergey Tretyakov characterised Guillou as a "classic agent". "Because he accepted money and, worst of all, signed receipts, there's no question about it. The handling of him could be a textbook example at the KGB school in Moscow". Espionage prosecutor Tomas Lindstrand wrote to PON that "Agent and spy are not synonymous ideas an agent does not have to commit acts of espionage. An agent can perform assignments for his handler without crossing the line to what is prosecutable." Säpo at the time was skeptical towards Lemberg's report and commented that it found nothing illegal in a newspaper man writing an article based on public information and delivering it to Jevgenij Gergel. Stenius's conclusion caused controversy, and a number of newspaper leader writers demanded that she resign her post. On 1 June 2010, the Swedish Press Council [PON] acquitted Expressen of wrongdoing. Expressen denies having claimed that Guillou was guilty of the crime of "espionage", and PON agrees. The frontpage and headline assertions ("Guillou Secret Soviet Agent", "Confesses KGB mission", "Recruited by chief of espionage") according to PON "do not have well defined meanings". PON was also satisfied that the factual details of the story were fully covered in the text of the articles which also included Guillou's own account of the events.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, Guillou was associated with the Maoist Clarté association. He was also a member of the Communist Party of Sweden (formerly known as the Communist League Marxists Leninists), a minor Maoist party active mainly during the 1970s, for six months until he was expelled for refusing to pay the monthly member fee while he was living abroad. Today, he no longer considers himself a communist or a Maoist, but describes himself as socialist with a position on the political spectrum "to the left of the Left Party" (a Swedish party formerly known as "The Left Party, the Communists").

Guillou is known for his support of the Palestinian people, and he has over the years consistently criticized Israel. In 1976, he wrote, "Zionism is in its foundation racist because the state of Israel is built upon an apartheid system, exactly like South Africa". He has repeatedly taken the stance that Israel is an "apartheid state". In an article published in Svenska Dagbladet in 1977, Guillou wrote, "I'm an optimist, I believe that Israel will cease to exist prior to Armageddon". The book Irak – det nya Arabien (Iraq – The New Arabia), written by Guillou and his then wife Marina Stagh, was published in 1977. In the book, which deals with Iraq under the Baath Party before Saddam Hussein's presidency, it is argued that the "European idea of Iraq as a particularly violent country" is simply "a blend of political propaganda and racist fantasies" (p. 91). Guillou and Stagh did the research for the book in 1975 and they assert that, at this time, "the Baath regime is clearly popular and among the most stable in the Arab World" (pp. 168–169), the freedom of the press enjoyed in Iraq was more extensive than in most other countries in the world (p. 239) and it would come as no surprise to the authors if "well before the year 2000, Iraq will have surpassed European countries in living standards" (p. 174). The conditions at the Abu Ghraib prison, which Guillou claims to have visited as the first Western journalist, are described as excellent and even "better than Swedish prisons" (pp. 249–250). The book was published two years before Saddam Hussein became President of Iraq in 1979. In his 2009 autobiography, Ordets makt och vanmakt (The Power and Powerlessness of the Word), Guillou states that quotes such as the ones cited could be considered true back then. He does however also write that Saddam Hussein, who at the time of publishing was the vice president under President Ahmed Hassan Al Bakr, was the actual leader of Iraq.

Immediately following the September 11 attacks, Guillou caused controversy when he walked out of the Göteborg Book Fair in the midst of the three minutes of silence observed throughout Europe to honour the victims of the attacks. In an article in Aftonbladet, Guillou argued that the event was an act of hypocrisy, stating that "the U. S. is the great mass murderer of our time. The wars against Vietnam and its nearby countries alone claimed four million lives. Without a minute of silence in Sweden". He also criticised those who said that the attacks were "an attack on us all" by stating that the attacks were only "an attack on U. S. imperialism". He labeled the media's reaction to the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot and the measures taken to avoid havoc at the airports unnecessary since the suspects had already been caught. He argued that the media coverage was sensationalist and driven by profit considerations, and that the British government used the occasion to give an impression of success in the War on Terrorism. Pointing out that no explosives had been found, he wrote in a column headlined "Don't believe anything written about al Qaida" that the reactions had resulted in a victimization of the Muslim community. When the film Evil (2003), an adaption of Guillou's autobiographical novel from 1981, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2003 Guillou was still listed as a terrorist by the US government, because of the IB affair, but managed to get a visa for attending the Academy Award ceremony. However, the film’s director Mikael Håfström had given Guillou's ticket to his own wife and Guillou was not able to attend the ceremony.

Ever since the IB affair and the resulting prison sentence for espionage in 1973, Guillou has been a strong critic of the Swedish Security Service. According to Guillou, the Security Service has listed him as a terrorist, which has led to problems with security officials when visiting other countries. In recent years, Guillou has repeatedly criticised some people and groups within the Swedish radical feminist movement. However, he rejects being called an "antifeminist". and that "homosexuality didn't exist in the 17th century".

Guillou's first novel Om kriget kommer (If the War Comes) was published in 1971. It's a political spy novel told in the form of a pseudo documentary about how Sweden in the early 1970s launches a military invasion of South Africa and Rhodesia to overthrow the white apartheid regimes. The main character is the Swedish military spy Karl Aronovitch who prepares the invasion together with African politicians and guerillas. His second novel, Det stora avslöjandet (The Big Disclosure), was written in prison (see the IB affair) and was published in 1974. The book is intended as a comedy and is a semi autobiographical novel about a young journalist writing for men's magazines in Stockholm in the early 1970s. The author's alter ego created for the novel is named Erik Ponti, a character that would return in several of his later novels. His third novel, Ondskan (The Evil), was published in 1981, and is heavily autobiographical in depicting the author's teenage experience of an abusive step father and a sadistic upperclass boarding school. As in his previous novel, the character Erik Ponti functions as his fictional alter ego. The movie adaption Evil in 2003 was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 76th Academy Awards and won three Swedish Guldbagge Awards including Best Film.

In 2004 Guillou returned to contemporary crime novels meant to depict the world of Western politics and law in the wake of 9/11 and the War on terror, mainly focusing on the new character Eva Johnsén Tanguy, a high ranking police officer who comes to work within the Swedish security service. She is introduced in Tjuvarnas marknad ("Market of Thieves") in 2004, and her story continues in Fienden inom oss ("The Enemy Within Us") in 2007 and Men inte om det gäller din dotter ("But Not If It Concerns Your Daughter") in 2008, a novel which also saw the return of Carl Hamilton.