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This document is archival in nature and is intended Le présent document a une valeur archivistique et for those who wish to consult archival documents fait partie des documents d’archives rendus made available from the collection of Public Safety disponibles par Sécurité publique Canada à ceux Canada. qui souhaitent consulter ces documents issus de sa collection. Some of these documents are available in only one official language. Translation, to be provided Certains de ces documents ne sont disponibles by Public Safety Canada, is available upon que dans une langue officielle. Sécurité publique request. Canada fournira une traduction sur demande. 1 CRISIS MANAGEMENT BROCHURE COMPILED BY C.S.C. ONT. VOLUME 2 the Crown. document does not being to Cob yet of hi*, --Proper authonzeon must be °blamed from the author for use an jIntended document l'appartiennent Orop.euteor deprésent contenu du pfér:sell ■ffieo.r• • '.--Ial,".bute.tit lernent mentle ee‘à0 :•: : -•,•••• Z -re. 1 HV 9 025 C7 V.2 re- " ,••:•• . •?Yee.. ""•:;(•-:•.•' "ek•:: • --•••••:•ii rée04, I 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 VI V 90 S THE BANK DRAMA C Lt, A year ago last August 23rd, an escaped Swedish convict walked into the main office of one of Stockholm's largest banks, the Sveriges Kreditbank, shortly after it had opened, bent on carrying out the most ambitious exploit of a long criminal career. He was well equipped. One hand hugged a loaded submachine gun under a folded jacket. The other hand held a large canvas suitcase whose contents included reserve ammunition, plastic explosives, blasting caps, safety fuses, lengths of rope, a knife, wool socks, sunglasses, two walkie-talkies, and a transistor radio. The convict wore gloves, and another pair was in the bag; he intended to give them to an accomplice who was not yet on the scene but whose appearance he confidently expected to arrange. The convict himself was thoroughly disguised: he was got up in a pair of toy-store spectacles and a thick brown wig; his cheeks were rouged; and his reddish-brown mustache and eyebrows were dyed jet black. In the hope of being mistaken for a foreigner, he spoke English - a required language in Swedish schools - with an American accent. For two days, while the convict remained in the bank, the police tried to figure out his identity, succeeding only when his voice, during a radio broadcast, sounded familiar to a sharp-eared detective. The convict proved to be Jan-Erik Olsson, a highly intelligent thirty-two-year-old thief and safecracker, who came from the south of Sweden; his past criminal activities had taken place in that area, and provincial police knew him as an expert in the use of explosives and as someone who had not hesitated to use a gun. Olsson had been convicted in February, 1972, for , grand larceny. He had achieved a certain fame that year when an elderly couple in Helsingborg surprised him in the act of ransacking their house. Startled, the husband had keeled over, whereupon the wife asked Olsson to fetch heart medicine that her husband kept in the kitchen; the robber complied, then resumed his pillaging, finally departing with considerable loot. He had served about half of his three year sentence at the penitentiary in Kalmar, south of Stockholm, when he escaped while on furlough a couple of weeks before his arrival at the Kreditbank. Olsson had scarcely entered the Kreditbank's street floor when a number of customers and forty assorted employees - tellers, mail- deposit clerks, secretaries, junior officials - knew that they were to have no ordinary Thursday morning; within seconds he had whipped out his submachine gun and fired at the ceiling, sending down a shower of concrete and glass. "1 thought he was an Arab terrorist," Birgitta Lundblad, an employee of ten years' standing, who handled bank drafts from abroad, told me later. She was a year younger than Olsson. Fair and attractive in appearance, she commuted daily from Jakobsberg, a suburb less than a half hour away, where she lived with her husband - a civil engineer - and their two daughters, aged three and one and a half. At the bank, Birgitta's reputation was that of a diligent worker with an almost perfect attendance record. She liked the rhythm of her work and the responsibility that went with her duties; whenever she contemplated her future, she told me, it included the band and, of course, her family. At the time of Olsson's entrance, she recalled, she was wondering whether to investigate a sale of children's apparel at a nearby shop during her lunch break, but that possibility passed quickly from her mind with the violent stranger's arrival. All that mattered, it suddenly /2 seemed to her, was his next move. Still brandishing his submachine gun, he was announcing in English, "The party has just begun" - a line, police investigators later established, that he had recently heard while seeing an American movie about a convict on the loose. Instinctively, most of his terrified audience at the Kreditbank dropped to the floor, but some secluded themselves in a small repository for securities, and others, panicked or intrepid, or both, made for the exits, rushing pell-mell into Norrmalmstorg, perhaps Stockholm's busiest square, whose dominant feature is the Kreditbank's own squat, massive facade, five stories high. Planting his transistor radio on a teller's counter, Olsson turned it on full blast, and the bank's marble interior abruptly reverberated to the sounds of rock music. As Olsson raised the volume, his eyes fell on a stenographer who was delivering a letter she had just typed to its author, in the loan department. She was Kristin Ehnmark, a spirited, black-haired woman of twenty-three. Kristin was personally destined to learn that Olsson was using the radio to pick up news of police reactions to his exploit, but when the jarring music filled the bank she could discern no method in his apparent madness. She told me, "I believed a maniac had come into my life. I believed I was seeing something that could happen only in America." Horrified, she watched Olsson take some rope from his canvas bag and hand it to a male bookkeeper, whom he commanded to bind her hands and ankles with it. On the floor in a matter of seconds, and shifting uncomfortably in her bonds, Kristin regretted the day she had ever left home--a gold-mining village in Sweden's far north. That had happened three and a half years before, when, in her last days as a teen-ager, she came south with a young man to whom she was engaged; he had been offered an excellent post in Stockholm and was refusing to accept it unless Kristin accompanied him. In the capital, she had taken the first job that came along--the one at the bank--hardly aware of it while her romance flourished. The romance had eventually foundered, though, and at that point she had realized that the world of banking wasn't for her. Impatiently, in the spring of 1973, she had decided to study social work, but the courses she needed, she had discovered, wouldn't be getting under way until September. Almost daily, Kristin told me, she had chafed over the delay, but today, August 23, 1973, her ankles struggling vainly in Olsson's rope, she realized more acutely than ever that she had lingered too long in the banking business. She was berating herself for this once again, Kristin said, when she sensed that she wasn't alone on the floor. Twisting herself onto her left side, she saw Birgitta lying nearby, as tightly bound as herself was. Scarcely had Kristin taken in this sight when she heard Olsson order the male bookkeeper to tie up yet a third employee--Elisabeth Oldgren, a twenty-one-year-old cashier in the foreign-exchange department, who had been with the bank fourteen months. Small and blond, she had brown eyes whose essential expression was one of unusual gentleness. Looking back, Kristin feels certain it was Elisabeth's eyes that accounted for the special care with which the bookkeeper placed her on the floor. Until Olsson brought Kristin and Elisabeth together, so to speak, they had had only the barest nodding acquaintance--a fact that seems astonishing to them now, for, as they were to discover in the next several days, they had much in common. Like Kristin, Elisabeth wanted to leave the bank. Elisabeth, /3 3 too, was awaiting admission to a school in the fall--in her case, a nursing school. And, like Kristin, Elisabeth had a love of the north country; though she had been born and brought up in Uppsala, only an hour out of Stockholm, more than once she had visited the Arctic region, whose frozen wastes, she said, reminded her of human loneliness.