Spies are born to be spies. At least, that is what you would think if you were to believe John le Carré. In his novels, the British intelligence officer George Smiley and his colleagues spend a great deal of time and effort searching for and recruiting lost, often idealistic, persons with a talent for dissimulation. Left-leaning tendencies are an asset when they are moving in communist circles. Regardless of ideology, these people are drawn to espionage as an exciting, secretive alternative to humdrum normality.

I have no idea how accurate this is, but there is no doubt that the Swedish spy Karin Lannby would have been a great fit for one of le Carré’s novels. She was no master spy, and her name was never associated with any major security breach. However, she becomes more interesting if we focus less on spying as a profession, more on ‘spy’ as the description of a type.

She was born in 1916 and grew up in the garden suburb of Ålsten in west Stockholm. Her father, Gunnar, a journalist, died of the Spanish flu when Karin was three years old. Her mother, Lilly, had a lucrative job as the Swedish representative of the American film production company Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. She had been Greta Garbo’s companion when she crossed the Atlantic on her way to Hollywood.

MGM’s office was situated near Hotel Carlton in Kungsgatan. Lilly was one of the hotel’s owners. She had the use of the company car, a Buick and driver, and she could afford to take Karin and her brother, three years older, for trips abroad. But she was often away on business, so the children were raised by servants.

This cosmopolitan, but parentless, upbringing contributed to Karin Lannby’s unsettled, intrepid personality. She was precocious, intelligent and good at languages. She dressed in style and dyed her hair red when she was still at school. She was interested in politics, and with her friend Elisabeth she frequented Corso in Sveavägen, a restaurant where radical students gathered in the early 1930s. She joined the socialist student organisation Clarté and the Communist Party youth organisation, which was close to Moscow.

At the age of 16, both she and Elisabeth fell in love with the poet Arnold Ljungdal, one of the leading figures of the Corso circle. He was around 40 years old and recently divorced when he embarked on a relationship with both girls. Rather than ending in jealousy, the relationship seems to have brought the two girls closer together. Ljungdal later described Karin as the leader of the two. It may have been the attempt of a seducer of teenage girls at justifying his actions, but at the same time it is hard to see the energetic 16-year-old only as the passive victim of an older man.

During the winter of 1933, when Karin was attending her final year of upper-secondary school, her mother, who was worried about the company her daughter kept, took her to Tenerife for a prolonged stay. This did not cool Karin’s feelings for Ljungdal; she wrote to him almost every day. She even sent him a poem, which he managed to get published in Stockholms-Tidningen. It proved she had talent, but also an adventurous mind. The poem’s protagonist wants to be a still blue sea that sings ‘melancholy songs at night’ and ‘a sea that sprays salty foam into my face and pulls my heaving boat towards the depths’.

It is clear that the young Karin Lannby was a sensitive soul who, as it would have been expressed at the time, suffered from Sehnsucht, a wisftulf longing, and Weltschmerz, feelings of melancholy world-weariness. Her communist convictions were probably sincere, but it was also a rhetorically satisfying way of expressing teenage dissatisfaction with a middle-class, conventional world she found closed-minded and claustrophobic.

By the winter of 1934–35 she was back in Stockholm. She graduated and devoted herself to the Communist Party. She moved to a flat in Bastugatan in south-central Stockholm and became the neighbour of the famous working-class author Ivar Lo-Johansson. The following winter she enrolled at Stockholm University, but when civil war broke out in Spain she travelled to Valencia to volunteer at a hospital. She was still writing poetry, which resulted in the publication of the verse collection Cante Jondo at Norstedts in the autumn of 1937. It was critically acclaimed as having a promising ‘flowery charm’.

Thus far, the life of 20-year-old Karin Lannby was adventurous, but not implausible. However, in the autumn of 1937, at the time of her literary debut in Sweden, her life story took a more serious turn. Earlier that summer, a Spanish film director had arrived at the house in Ålsten with a proposal from the Spanish government intelligence service: would Karin be prepared to go to the south of France and infiltrate the Fascist networks loyal to General Franco? The director’s name was Luis Buñuel. Karin accepted and spent four months as a spy in Biarritz.

It came with a cost. It is not clear precisely what had happened to her, but she ended up in a Paris hospital suffering from both physical and mental problems. According to the French foreign police she was a ‘young Swedish woman, intellectual, cultivated, a poet and a journalist with a paranoid disposition aggravated by a hectic lifestyle’. Her mother brought her back to Stockholm in the winter of 1938, and she was admitted to Långbro psychiatric hospital. When she escaped at the beginning of May, she was advertised as missing in the newspapers with a published photograph.

Her mental diagnosis prevented her return to the Communist Party after she was discharged from hospital in August 1938. She went back to university and joined the student drama group, which met at the student union in Holländargatan. It is not clear how she was recruited by Swedish military intelligence, but only a month after the outbreak of the Second World War she was employed by the Defence Staff C Agency.

Karin Lannby’s first assignment was to befriend an Italian journalist by the name of Mario Vanni, a suspected German spy. He was known to attend Sunday tea dances at the Grand Hotel, and Lannby was sent there to make contact. But although Vanni invited her to dance several times, nothing came of it. He liked button-nosed girls, she explained in one of her debriefings, adding: ‘I don’t seem to be his type.’

But C Agency clearly appreciated Karin Lannby. Under the code name ‘Anette’, she became one of the agency’s most prolific informants. Her main asset was her political awareness, language and social skills, and her taste for partying. She frequented bars such as Blå Fågeln, Café Prag and other places where refugees, journalists, intellectuals and, not least, spies could be found. Wartime Stockholm was known as the ‘Casablanca of the North’, which was true in the sense that the neutral Swedish capital was a place where warring intelligence services were able to move around freely. But even though there were many spies in Stockholm, none of them seems to have disclosed anything very important; they were merely surveilling one another.

The Swedish C Agency also wanted to keep an eye on everyone who was out and about at night. This was information that Karin Lannby supplied in abundance. Her reports on people were often insightful. She wrote the following about a German diplomat: ‘I think I can get any information you want out of him… He may be dispatched to Cairo, it seems that the Germans are preparing hostilities in the Near East…’

Her reports could also be insinuating, like her description of visitors to a restaurant in Stockholm:

1) spies 2) German refugees 3) various old women 4) in the company of unbelievably famous artists sponsored by them, 5) regular gigolos 6) a few pansies, some of whom would like an adventurous past 7) elderly gentlemen with so-called cultural interests (ie film actresses making their debut) and, finally, 8) Nazi youth with a criminal background.

Karin Lannby knew what she was talking about, but there is also a sensual pleasure in her reports, similar to what an author may feel when she or he captures people or settings in a novel. She clearly took pleasure in secretly reporting on acquaintances, friends, even lovers. Her judgements were direct, but not always correct.

She wrote about the German anti-Nazi refugee Kurt Deutsch that he ‘is generally considered a very devious and unpleasant person’. Deutsch worked with Ture Nerman, who published the anti-Nazi journal Trots Allt! (‘Despite Everything!’), and he was in contact with British intelligence and an informer for the Stockholm police department. The fact that Lannby considered him devious may have had something to do with her background in the Stalinist SKP party. Deutsch had broken with the German communists and was considered a ‘semi-Trotskyist’ in these circles.

It is hard to say to what extent Karin Lannby’s communist background motivated her spycraft. During the first few years of the war, Moscow ordered the Swedish communists to stop fighting the Nazis on account of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It was not until after the German attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 that the Swedish communists were able to support Swedish defence. But Lannby had started working for C Agency as early as 1939, which may suggest that there was no political motive. On the other hand, she had ceased to be an active communist in 1938, when the communists still saw Nazism as the chief enemy, and she may have adhered to that belief.

It was more likely the thrill, the drama and the feeling of being at the centre of events that attracted her. It certainly was not the money. The remuneration she received to move around Stockholm at night was not enough to support her. She made a living working as a secretary, for example to a German correspondent who clearly offered opportunities for making new contacts and thus delivering new reports to C Agency. She had not given up on her ambition of putting her dramatic talent to use on stage. She did appear in a play at the student union in spring 1940, and she attended meetings organised by the university drama group. One Saturday in May – as the billboards shouted out the German attack on France – she went to a flat in Svartmangatan in Stockholm’s Old Town where the drama students used to meet. The evening’s guest speaker was a young theatre director who had recently had a major success with a production of Macbeth at Mäster Olofsgården: Ingmar Bergman.

He had set his eyes on Karin Lannby earlier that spring at the university café in Holländargatan, noting:

Her body was stocky with slanting shoulders, high-set breasts, powerful hips and thighs. Her face was flat with a long, well-shaped nose, broad forehead and expressive dark blue eyes… In the evenings she presided over a table in the corner of the university café, drank brandy and chain smoked an American Virginia cigarette called Goldflake, which came in a dark yellow tin with a blood red seal.

Bergman fell for her like a ton of bricks. Karin clearly saw something in Ingmar, too. He was hardly a womaniser in the traditional sense. He wore strange clothes, could not dance and did not like jazz. But like her, he was fascinated by the human drama. The difference was of course that he had dedicated his life to the theatre, while she had turned her life into a drama. He later described her as ‘a woman with dangerous subhuman traits, hysteria and erotomania’.

Karin’s feelings for Ingmar appear to have been genuine. She encouraged him to look after himself, she nursed him when he was ill and did her best to charm his family. She accompanied him to services in Hedvig Eleonora church to listen to Ingmar’s father’s sermons, and she joined family dinners at the ‘priest’s house’ in Storgatan. It did not stop her from submitting a rather unsentimental report about her new boyfriend:

The stud. Ingemar [sic] Bergman, son of the vicar of Hedvig Eleonora parish, is a young man entirely without interest, mentioned that his brother, a graduate of humanities and law at the For. Min. is now employed at Sweden’s ‘intelligence service’. As I.B.’s friendship with me is very superficial, the brother should be warned about his loquacity.

This was a somewhat skewed report. Her relationship with Ingmar – with whom she spent time day and night – was hardly ‘superficial’. Karin probably did not want to expose her love life to the Swedish intelligence service. The stated opinion, ‘without interest’, was perhaps a way of showing affection. The information about Ingmar’s older brother Dag is also rather exaggerated.

Karin Lannby also took an interest in a young man who was staying in Ingmar’s old room. His name was Dieter Winter, a German Jewish refugee for whom Ingmar’s parents Erik and Karin had helped obtain a Swedish residence permit. Ingmar’s mother Karin viewed Dieter as another son, but neither Ingmar nor Dag were particularly happy about their mother’s care for him. It is unclear whether this affected Lannby in any way, but she did submit one of her standard, insinuating reports:

A German, half Jewish, young man, Dieter Winter, has for the past two years been staying at Vicar Bergman’s, Storgatan 7, as an act of mercy. His father is an Arian German artillery colonel and nobleman… The young man’s emigration seems strange: he came here on an exit visa in 1939, bringing a great deal of luggage… reported that he was to spend the night with the Bergman family and that he would travel to Umeå the following day where he was to begin a new position. This turned out to be false. The National Board of Health and Welfare explained that no work permit had been or could be issued…

This was mostly correct. It is impossible to know whether Ingmar had provided this information or if it had come up during a general conversation around the dinner table at Storgatan. However, Lannby omitted the non-trivial fact that Erik Bergman had, through his contacts, managed to obtain a residence permit for Dieter. It is unclear whether Lannby’s intelligence would have resulted in the young refugee being deported or arrested, but there is no doubt that she intended to create problems for him. Dieter Winter remained in Sweden and later worked as a reporter at the Expressen tabloid.

During the autumn of 1941, Ingmar and Karin lived together more or less permanently in a small flat in south-central Stockholm. ‘One room, four walls, a ceiling and two mattresses covered in dirty sheets and two dusty blankets that used to be a portière,’ wrote Bergman later. He depicted their life as if out of La bohème, with the furniture at the pawnbrokers and empty stomachs. But in the background was his mother, Karin Bergman, and the flat in Storgatan. Dieter regularly delivered meatball sandwiches and bottles of wine in exchange for their dirty laundry.

Ingmar’s parents were wary of their son’s manipulative new woman. Once during dinner, Erik, the father, did not utter a single word. Ingmar’s mother was a little more forgiving. She wrote in her diary: ‘I feel sorry for the girl, but Ingmar won’t be able to cope with her.’ She was right. The relationship between Karin and Ingmar ended in the winter of 1942.

By that time, Karin had acquired extensive contacts within the German propaganda and intelligence services in Stockholm. She even became a double agent of sorts. Both the Germans and the Russians asked her to provide information, and her Swedish handlers encouraged her to sustain these contacts. It is hard to make sense of these transactions, and it is still very unclear who was betraying whom. The British seem to have suspected that Lannby was working for the Germans. But her reports to C Agency show that she was loyal only to Sweden. The beginning of the end came when C Agency asked her to infiltrate the so-called Swedish-Southern European Information Agency, which was run by a German and financed by Hungary. Whatever it was that they were doing, their finances were mismanaged, and when Lannby did not receive her salary she threatened to sue them for breach of contract. According to Lannby, this resulted in her being physically threatened, and she asked the Stockholm police spy department for protection. But they claimed nothing could be done as it was ‘one person’s word against another’s’.

As a result of the conflict between Lannby and the Stockholm police, C Agency transferred her to Gothenburg, where she went to live in a squat while reporting on foreigners and people meeting in restaurants. This activity was less important than the work she had done in Stockholm.

Karin left Sweden at the end of the 1940s, but she did not disappear from the public eye. She rose to fame after meeting the Sicilian brigand Salvatore Giuliano, known for robbing rich estate owners and helping poor peasants. She had read about Giuliano in the Italian press, and she decided to travel to the mountains for an interview. This resulted in a piece of reportage that was printed by newspapers in Europe and the United States. The second time she tried to get in touch with him she was arrested by the police and deported.

She did not return to Sweden, however, but settled in Paris where she took up acting again, among other things appearing in a film based on Jean Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles. She renounced her Swedish citizenship and spent the rest of her life with a radical working-class priest. She died in Paris at the age of 91. Karin Lannby’s contributions as a spy are neither outstanding nor extraordinary. She was a foot soldier in a secret army that, to an outsider, is as confusing and conflicting as her personality. It is not hard to imagine a Swedish George Smiley, in his later years, going to find ‘Anette’ in a working-class Paris suburb to discuss some Second World War spy yarn that has suddenly come to light.