Spies like US

Sweden is building a foreign spy agency from scratch. It is in a hurry

STOCKHOLM

The bill that reached the Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament, on June 18th looks like any other: hundreds of pages of sober legislative prose. Its subject is the creation of a wholly new spy agency. The Swedish Foreign Intelligence Service (Sveriges utrikes underrättelsetjänst, or UND) is to open in January 2027. Countries tend to acquire such services after losing wars, or empires. Sweden has been at peace since 1814.

For as long as it has spied on anyone, Sweden has done so through its armed forces. The military intelligence service, MUST, produces the assessments; its most secretive arm, the Office for Special Collection (KSI), runs human sources abroad. FRA, a civilian body under the defence ministry, taps signals. Säpo, the security service, catches foreign agents at home. A civilian service for spying abroad has never existed, which makes Sweden an oddity among European countries of its size.

UND takes the civilian work: political intelligence on foreign governments, liaison with friendly services, open-source collection, and KSI with its human sources. The generals keep what is military, whether strategic, operational, tactical or technical. FRA stays the sole producer of signals intelligence; UND merely joins the short list of bodies allowed to task it. And the law draws a hard line at the border. The new service may do nothing that counts as fighting crime at home, which belongs to the police and Säpo.

From barracks to bureau

The speed is un-Swedish. A review of the whole intelligence system was ordered in October 2023. Its report, delivered on June 13th 2025, proposed the new service; a special investigator was put to work that autumn, a draft law went out in February 2026 and the bill arrived in June. From commissioning the review to opening the agency’s doors will have taken a little over three years. Swedish public inquiries have been known to spend longer than that agreeing on definitions.

Ask why, and the government points to a security situation that keeps worsening, and to “total defence”, the doctrine of readying the whole of society for war. NATO, oddly, is a footnote. FRA told legislators that joining the alliance, which Sweden did in March 2024, created no need for new intelligence law by itself; the one accession-related fix was a secrecy rule for allied information. The blunter explanation is Russia. Its war in Ukraine, and the sabotage and harassment that have spread around the Baltic since, have changed what Swedish officials believe they need to know, and how fast.

Militaries ask military questions: where the brigades are, what the missiles can do. Governments now want answers about other things, from meddling in politics to sanctions evasion, and they want them across ministries. Putting that work in civilian hands, the government argues, serves the whole state and matches the way Sweden’s most important partners are built. It cites America and Britain, where the CIA and MI6 sit apart from military intelligence. Nordic models were examined and dropped. The opposition likes one Finnish idea the bill omits: a parliamentary committee to watch the new service.

There were reasons the old arrangement lasted. During the cold war Sweden professed neutrality while co-operating quietly with the West, and espionage buried inside the defence establishment was easy to keep vague. It blew up once. In 1973 journalists exposed the IB, a secret bureau that kept files on Swedish leftists, and went to jail for it. The affair still colours Swedish arguments about secret power, and the new law’s flat ban on domestic snooping is best read with 1973 in mind.

Checks, please

The budget is modest: SKr170m ($18m) this year, SKr600m in 2027 and SKr1bn ($105m) a year by 2029, nearly all of it moved across from the defence budget. On staff numbers the bill says little. Beside the agencies Sweden wants to emulate, UND will be a minnow.

The complaints, and there are plenty, concern method. Opposition parties call the process rushed and thinly anchored in parliament, and warn that moving spies between agencies in the middle of a crisis could weaken what Sweden already has. The Bar Association objected during consultation to loose definitions and to the privacy implications: UND will handle personal data under its own law, carved out of the EU’s data-protection regime on national-security grounds. Oversight stays with the existing inspectorate and the court that approves signals-intelligence collection, both renamed for the occasion. Swedes have been here before. A law of 2008 letting FRA sift cable traffic crossing the border caused a furious row, and surveillance powers have widened steadily since, often through cross-party deals on terrorism.

For all that, nobody moved to kill the bill. The foreign-affairs committee backed it, and even the critics conceded that voting it down now would leave Sweden with no working foreign-intelligence service at all, halfway through the move. An election due in September concentrated minds; whoever wins will inherit an agency months from opening.

The harder part comes after the vote. Spy services are built slowly. Sources take years to recruit, and allied agencies take years to convince that a new letterhead can keep old secrets. By the time Stockholm next empties for midsummer, the new service should be at work. If things go well, nobody will notice.

A note on sources

This article is based on a research report drawing on 168 documents from the Swedish Riksdag’s open-data archive, published between 2021 and 2026. They comprise 51 government bills, 70 committee reports, 15 chamber protocols, 15 parliamentary communications, 10 members’ motions and 7 written questions and interpellations. Of the 168, 22 are cited directly in the report’s analysis, chief among them the June 2026 bill establishing UND (prop. 2025/26:290).