”Men ÖB Bengt Gustafsson tog mig i hand och tackade.”

En jämförelse mellan Jan Guillous och Peter Bratts rättfärdiganden av IB-avslöjandet 1973 respektive 2017

Abstract

In the spring of 1973, the Swedish journalists Peter Bratt and Jan Guillou exposed the secret Swedish intelligence service IB in the magazine Folket i Bild/Kulturfront. They were later arrested and sentenced to prison for espionage for their reporting on IB. In this article, the accounts of Peter Bratt and Jan Guillou on the IB-publication in the original police interrogations from 1973 are examined and compared with the accounts presented by Bratt and Guillou in interviews with the author conducted in 2017. The results show that there is a considerable overlap between the accounts of the two journalists between 1973 and 2017 and the relevance of accounts in analyzing power relations. One of the conclusions is that it is interesting to study accounts since they offer us as social scientists important information on which identities social actors choose to assume in certain situations.