Hunt for mystery sub in Sweden evokes Cold War tensions

It wasn’t exactly The Hunt for Red October, but the week-long search for a mysterious submersible in Swedish waters brought back 30-year old memories of similar cat-and-mouse games at the height of the cold war.

On Friday, Sweden’s navy called off the hunt for what had been reported as “foreign underwater activity” in the area of the archipelago that extends from the capital, Stockholm, into the Baltic Sea.

“We assess that the (vessel) that violated our waters has now left,” said Swedish navy Rear Adm. Anders Grenstad.

The suspect craft was first seen on Oct. 17. When it appeared again on Oct. 20, the Swedish armed forces widened the search, which eventually included maritime reconnaissance aircraft, helicopters, minesweepers and other surface naval vessels, and about 200 military personnel.

Defense analysts believe the mystery vessel was not a large, nuclear submarine, but rather a Soviet-era midget submarine of the type used by Russian special forces, and typically launched from beneath a larger mother ship.

The U.S. Naval Institute reported that, “the presence of a Russian-owned cargo ship, NS Concord, acting suspiciously in the Baltic and reports of encrypted transmissions on a Russian emergency channel toward the Russian naval base at Kaliningrad originating near Sweden point toward the operation of a Russian midget sub.”

According to The Guardian, the Russian government “issued a statement denying that any of its craft had violated Swedish sovereignty and suggested it could be a submarine from the Netherlands engaged in exercises in the Baltic.”

Dutch defense officials denied this, saying the submarine in question, the Bruinvis, had been involved in a joint exercise with Sweden but had subsequently sailed on to Estonia, where it was anchored on the date of the mystery sub’s first appearance.

“I don’t want to comment on what Russia says,” Grenstad said. “I have never singled out any nation. This is intelligence work to determine what is in our waters and what nationality it is.”

After a tense international incident in 1981 when a Soviet submarine carrying nuclear weapons ran aground off its south coast, the Swedish military built a capacity for anti-submarine warfare. However Sweden no longer owns any anti-submarine helicopters, which were phased out in 2008 after deep defense spending cuts following the end of the cold war.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.