Michael Townley’s link to the murder of Olof Palme

The CIA agent has been mentioned several times as a possible suspect in the murder of the former Prime Minister of Sweden. But it has never been possible to prove that he was in Sweden on the night of the murder. Now a witness comes forward and says that he possibly saw the CIA agent at the Grand that night and that Townley was behaving very strangely.

Kajsa Ekis Ekman. Journalist Parabol Press. Stockholm. 11/2023. Odd Greitz is a retired senior physician, specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry. He is a respected and frequently consulted voice on issues such as youth substance abuse and anabolic steroids. At the time of Palme’s murder, he was employed at Maria Ungdom in Stockholm, where he had worked since 1984. Through Greitz’s daughter, I contacted him, when I learned that he had a testimony that, for various reasons, did not appeared at the Palme investigation.

Talk about February 28, 1986.

My wife and I were going to the cinema to see the movie “Ran” by Japanese director Kurosawa. We had hired a babysitter, since the movie is three hours long. It was a very cold day with icy winds from the north. We arrived at the Grand shortly before nine. The lobby was packed and it was hard to see where the line started. Right behind us was the Palme couple. They asked us where the line for tickets started and my wife showed it to Lisbet.

What did you think then? It must have been great to see Palme there, right?

We thought: wow, what a country we live in! Here the Prime Minister comes out among the people. People also showed respect for his privacy, I didn’t see anyone come up to ask for an autograph or anything like that.

What mood were they in? Did they seem worried or stressed in any way?

No, they seemed happy. Lisbet led the way, Olof stayed behind and smiled, happy and satisfied. They didn’t seem nervous at all. Then they disappeared into the crowd, later we found out that they were going to see the Swedish film “The Mozart Brothers”, but we didn’t know it at the time.

We went to our small living room. It was sparsely populated. We sat in the back row. The movie starts. Five to ten minutes into the film, the door opens and a man enters. He sits in our row, in the seat closest to the door, but he doesn’t close it. Light and sound come in from the hallway and that bothers me. Why don’t you close the door? The light also falls on him, but it doesn’t seem to bother him. I watch it repeatedly throughout the course of the movie.

How does it look like?

Straight hair, brown/ash color combed to the left. The hair goes a little over the ears. He has a narrow face and plastic-framed glasses. With his face shiny, as if he had been smeared with something.

Swedish?

I would say general European appearance. He could have had Swedish, Belgian or Italian parents. But the strange thing was that he had an English Australian waxed coat, of a type never seen in Sweden at that time. In 1986, you wore a down jacket in winter, especially on February 28th. But he had, as I said, a beige raincoat with wide lapels on the shoulders. Dark pants, if he had a bag I didn’t see it.

How can you have such detailed memories?

It’s probably a work injury. As a psychiatrist, I have had to pay attention to people’s appearance and behavior. So it was not a fleeting observation, but I observed him repeatedly in appearance, dress and behavior.

The whole time I had the feeling that he wasn’t paying attention to the movie, but to what was happening in the lobby. In the last hour, the tension in the film increases. It is a samurai fight and there is a confrontation. He then gets up and leaves the room. It was just then that more people arrived in the lobby; Another movie had finished and there was chatter and murmuring. We later discovered that it coincided with the end of the movie “The Mozart Brothers.” (Ran is 2 hours and 42 minutes, while The Mozart Brothers is 1 hour and 49 minutes, Editor’s Note).

Did you close the door when you left?

I think so.

Didn’t he come back in?

No.

And then? Your movie finished and you left?

We got out and ran around the corner to get the car. We didn’t notice anything in Sveavägen. The next day we woke up and read about the murder and said, This can’t be true! It was extremely disturbing. We wondered when and how it had happened.

Did you contact the police?

Not at that time. Hans Holmér, the head of the investigation, later asked for public comments. We agreed that my wife would contact the police. The question she received from the police was: “Did he look Kurdish?” What does a Kurd look like?, responded my wife, who asked her to specify what she was referring to. When she described her observations, they asked her to come inside. Police showed her several hours worth of slides of different people, but she didn’t believe anyone looked like the man she remembered.

The years go by. At some point, my wife and I talked about this night at the Grand, and it turns out she told the police about a completely different man: one standing in the lobby with a dark jacket and a nervous demeanor. She didn’t look closer at the man who entered the room and left the door open, but we could see that she somehow confused these two people. I was sitting closer to the man so my wife couldn’t look at him the same way I did.

I then contact the police to correct the testimony. I can talk to someone from the Palme murder investigation, who is clearly not interested. When I finish, he says to me, “Are you ready?” He doesn’t ask any questions and doesn’t ask me to come in.

Then the years pass again. In the 2000s, I read a book by Gunnar Wall, which reports on several clues to the Palme murder. He mentions several agents who could be involved and I try to search the web for the ones he mentions. When I see one of them, he scares me tremendously. That’s the one from the cinema!

Who was?

A CIA agent named Michael Townley.

And are you sure it was him you saw?

As close as you can get. He didn’t have a mustache, as can be seen in photos from that time, but the appearance is as close to a description as you can get. That’s exactly what it seemed like. I have never seen anyone who looked more like this man. I’m open to the fact that this could be completely wrong, of course, and that he could have been someone else who had nothing to do with the murder.

Have you contacted the investigation about this?

Yes, I wrote a letter, but never received a response.

Do you think it was Palme’s murderer that you saw?

No I dont think so. His appearance does not match the description of the murderer. But he may have had some other kind of role, perhaps as an organizer. One thing is clear: he wasn’t there to see the movie.

Facts/Michael Townley

Michael Townley was a CIA agent and one of the Chilean regime’s main professional assassins.

He was the son of American businessman Vernon Townley, representative of Ford Motor Company in Chile.

Michael Townley was hired as an organizer by the Chilean dictatorship’s secret police, DINA. He was an expert in bombs and poisons and was behind several murders and attempted murders. Some of them took place on European soil in cooperation with local organizations. Townley did not carry out the murders himself, but planned them and hired local hitmen to carry them out.

In Chile, before the coup, he worked under the direction of CIA director David Atlee Philipps, organizing paramilitary groups and provoking arson attacks to prevent Allende from coming to power.

Townley was a member of the Cuban exile group The Chicago Junta and trained to plant car bombs in Miami. He was also part of Operation Condor.

His wife Mariana Callejas worked as an informant for the Chilean Security Police in the Socialist Party of Chile.

Townley was convicted in 1978 in the United States for participating in the murder of Allende’s American ambassador, Orlando Letelier, and his assistant, the American Ronnie Moffitt. In exchange for Townley testifying against his accomplice, he received a short sentence, while the others received up to 80 years in prison.

He was also convicted in his absence in Italy of the attempted murder of Chilean politician Bernardo Leighton and his wife. The couple was shot at on their own street, Via Aurelia, in Rome, at 8:20 p.m., as they were heading home. The murderer used a 9 mm caliber Beretta.

In the Review Commission report on the Palme murder, Townley is mentioned several times: “However, later in September of last year, FBI homicide investigators confirmed that Michael Townley had indeed stated that he had been involved in plans to kill Olof Palme on two occasions, specifically during his visits to Madrid and Mexico in the mid-1970s. He had received the assignment from the Chilean security service DINA.”

The review commission also writes that there is information that Townley should have been in Sweden, but this could not be confirmed.

Pierre Schori, ex-ambajador en la ONU de Suecia, He tells in an article that Sweden contacted the FBI about Townley to find out if he could have been in Sweden, since he was interesting for the investigation. Townley was then under federal witness protection since his release from prison in 1983.

The Review Commission report further states: “In March 1991, the American Embassy in London sent a memorandum to RPS, Interpol. The memo contains information from the United States Marshals Service regarding the whereabouts of Michael Townley during 1986. Michael Townley had made some trips within the United States. He had been contacted at his workplace on February 25, 1986 and again on March 2, 1986. He had not received a US passport. “His wife had abandoned the witness protection program and returned to Chile.”

With these assurances, the investigators appear to have been satisfied and left Townley there. It is not clear whether he was in the United States on February 28, nor whether he had a Chilean passport or any other passport.

The report also states that Palme investigators confused Townley with another professional assassin from Chile, Robert Thieme. They believed Thieme was an alias for Townley, when in reality they are two different people.

The author Anders Leopold wrote in his book The Swedish tree must be felled: It is clear from the 1999 Commission of Inquiry report that investigators into the murder of UN mediator and Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986 lost perhaps the most important clue in the entire murder investigation at an early stage. The reason was that the Intelligence Directorate and the security police mistakenly converted two professional assassins from Chile into the same person: Roberto Thieme and Michael Townley.

Gunnar Wall writes in his book “Konspiration Olof Palme” about the suspicions against Townley.

In an interview for Chilean TV, Michael Townley himself talks about his role in the CIA and DINA.

Michael Townley has not been questioned in connection with the murder of Olof Palme.

Townley is 81 years old today.