The Hunt for Red Herring: Sweden’s 2014 Russian Sub-Hunt Found Own Vessel

In October 2014, Sweden launched a massive eight-day witch hunt for a foreign submarine, which was suspected to be Russian. The chase in the Stockholm archipelago ended in a bitter fiasco, sparking a hot debate on whether the largest Nordic nation, with almost 10 million citizens, should abandon its non-alignment policy and join NATO on account of the fact that it is unable to defend itself properly.

However, it turns out that that incident was apparently a false alarm, and a source of potential embarrassment for the country’s military.

According to Sveriges Radio, in September 2015 the Swedish military announced that the chief evidence of the intrusion – a noise detected by early warning systems – was no longer valid as analysis indicated that it was emanated by a "Swedish source" and not some foreign submersible.

Nevertheless, the military officials still continued to insist that a foreign submarine did invade the Swedish waters, citing visual observations made by two onlookers.

Furthermore, both the government and the military decided not to publicly announce the fact that the echo picked by detection systems was emanating from a "Swedish source" in an apparent attempt to avoid embarrassing the Swedish armed forces, Sveriges Radio points out.