Swedish author and journalist Jan Guillou was on the payroll of the former Soviet Union’s secret service KGB.

Jan Guillou, who became famous in 1973 after exposing a secret intelligence organization that gathered information on Swedish communists, has admitted contacts with the KGB.

After a report in tabloid Expressen, saying that he had met Soviet agents over the period of five years from 1967, Jan Guillou confessed the contacts with agent Jevgenij Ivanovitj Gergel, the KGB’s man in Stockholm at the end of the 1960s. The facts were based on files from Swedish security police Säpo.

One of the assignments was to write a report about the Social Democrats’ approach to the Vietnam war. He was also asked to snitch an internal telephone directory from the American Embassy in Stockholm.

However, Jan Guillou claims his intention all along was to get close to the KGB and expose Soviet espionage activities in Sweden. He also said that he never revealed any secrets about Sweden.

”We never did anything other than talk politics,” Jan Guillou told Expressen. "It was just a few non-events and it is not a crime to meet foreign intelligence services”.

The contacts never led to any journalistic revelations. 

The 1973 exposure of the Swedish secret intelligence agency The Information Bureau (Informationsbyrån, IB) was made in collaboration with journalist Peter Bratt and led to a major domestic political disgrace, somewhat similar to the US Watergate scandal. They were both convicted of espionage and got a ten month prison sentence.

Jan Guillou's most well-known books are the spy fiction novels about Swedish spy Carl Hamilton.