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You're listening to the Witness History Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Tim Mansell.

Today we're going back to the early 1980s and a full-scale

Cold War military alert in Sweden.

A Soviet submarine is stranded and leaking oil off the southern coast of Sweden, near the country's main naval base of Karl Kruna.

The Swedes say the boat ran aggrand in their territorial waters and they're refusing the captain permission for a Soviet vessel to tow him home.

The submarines of a tight few...

It's the 28th of October 1981, the Cold War.

Sweden is a neutral country but it lives in constant fear of its neighbor across the Baltic Sea, the mighty Soviet Union.

My initial reaction actually was, oh, finally. There had been so many incidents, submarine violations of Swedish

waters, but nothing could be proven. Now this is something real.

Class Helmason had been trained as a Russian interpreter in the Swedish Navy.

This was a huge moment for Sweden and a huge moment for class.

My second thought was that I might be asked to go there as an interpreter and that happened.

And presumably you were quite excited about that.

Yes, yes, I realized that this was something historic.

And there was some danger this could have gone badly wrong.

...