April issue of Swedish Press

One of the inspiring things about this job are the interviews. Some are lots of fun to do, others are more challenging. This month’s interview in Swedish Press was something I had been looking forward to for a while because Jan Guillou is such an iconic figure in Sweden. Controversial as he is, there are few Swedes who do not pay attention to what he has to say. And he had more to say then we had space for.

One of the things I asked Jan Guillou about was the difficulty he had had getting a U.S. visa. He told me about the last time he was on US soil.

“My wife and I were going for Christmas to Tahiti. Only the Air France plane that left from Paris had to go down in Los Angeles for fuel and we thought that was no problem, but not any longer, now everybody had to go through passport control. And I was arrested there.”

Guillou was taken into a troubleshooting room where there were already about 30 “Arab-looking” men waiting for their turn. He was desperate to get back on the plane to his wife, so he did something he “would feel ashamed about later”.

“I walked up to these guys and I said this must be a mistake because as you can see I am a white man. Those were not of course the words I used. Instead of white man, I said Scandinavian citizen. They started to deal with me before the others. They checked the computers again and said I had to be expelled. It was all very polite and we came to the conclusion that the best thing was to expel me on the Air France plane. Because the alternative would be to empty a whole 747 and identify my luggage.”

On his way home, Guillou was back in the same room, and this time it was serious. “I said last time we found a brilliant solution and let’s do the same thing but they said it was different this time as we were going to cross over US territory. Eventually we worked out the same solution.”

When the movie Evil, based on his book, was selected among the five finalists for the Academy Awards in Hollywood, it took Guillou two and a half weeks to get a visa, but by then the director of the film had given Guillou’s invitation to his own wife.

Jan Guillou believes that his visa troubles are the fault of the Swedish secret police who “have forwarded information that does not have to be true, but it is enough with a suspicion”. His espionage conviction from 1973 was taken off the Swedish criminal register after 25 years. Then there is his position on 9-11. Guillou walked out from the Göteborg Book Fair in 2002 in the midst of the three minutes of silence that had been proclaimed throughout Europe to honour the victims of the attacks. Defending his protest in an article in Aftonbladet, Guillou wrote "the U.S. is the great mass murderer of our time. Only the wars against Vietnam and its nearby countries claimed four million lives. Without any minute of silence in Sweden".

He also rejected the notion that the attacks were "an attack on us all" countering that the attacks were only "an attack on U.S. imperialism."The last question that I always end all my interviews with is “What have I forgotten to ask?” This is because everybody has a story they want to tell and sometimes they have not had the chance to do that in the course of the questions we put to them. This is how Jan Guillou answered my last question:

“I never never remember any interview. I have a delete button in my head. When I hang up this telephone I will have forgotten this conversation. This is no disrespect for my fellow journalists. Not at all. On the contrary my principle is that I have never been asked any of these questions before, it is being asked for the first time and I can put myself in a condition that I really believe this. That comes from being interviewed all the time.”

I found this refreshing and, indeed, I did feel that this person, who is regarded as a bit arrogant and as having a huge superiority complex, showed a great deal of respect throughout the long interview that we unfortunately had to cut down quite considerably. Among other bits, we had to cut down some of Jan Guillou’s controversial political views, like his criticism of Israel and the war on terrorism.

So do read the interview in the April issue of Swedish Press!