Operation Claw

In 1945, it was controversial that the Americans operated in what was seen as a British controlled country, and that they secured information about its ally the Soviet Union, in cooperation with neutral Sweden.

In later years, a hypothesis that the Norwegian resistance fighter Kai Holst's sudden death in June 1945 was related to his involvement in the Operation Claw has been put forward by among others the historian Tore Pryser.

[3] The Yalta Conference in February 1945 had revealed conflicts of interest between the western allied nations on one side and the Soviet Union and the relation was severely strained.

[9][10] After a few weeks in Sweden they were on June 12 flown from Torslanda Airport close to Gothenburg to US occupied Germany and were interned in an American military camp at Wiesbaden.

[9] The search force that Kai Holst and other Norwegians were assisting were soon aware of that a number of German key personnel had been removed in the Swedish–American operation a month earlier.

[15] The historian Tore Pryser has put forward the hypothesis that Holst brought with him information from Lillehammer that could damage Operation Claw and thus was killed.

Operation Claw was the beginning of the postwar era cooperation between Swedish and US intelligence services, in violation of Sweden's officially stated neutrality.