• Series: Spy stories

Fran Ruvira, known for the long Orson West (2011), is on his way to obsession. He has been trying to recompose the puzzle of the life of Karin Lannby (1916-2007) for three years, for a documentary entitled Swedish Rhapsody . But there are many pieces, and many do not fit. It is what has a life wrapped in the shadows of espionage, that of an actress accustomed to lying. " For better or worse, you can never trust her, " admits Ruvira, who has found "revealing incongruities in some of the 1,700 declassified reports , from when he worked for Swedish counterintelligence. He is a fascinating character, because he constantly navigated between fiction and reality. "

Ruvira found her in a footnote to a book about the Civil War: "What was a Swedish spy and actress doing in Alcoy? And then I realized that I had always had her in front. Not only in Valencia, but also in the memories of Buñuel or Bergman , and in a film like The Terrible Children , by Jean-Pierre Melville ". In fact, Lannby is everywhere, like a female Forrest Gump with a strong sexual charge. A femme fatale of manual.

It was predestined. His mother, Lilly Lannby, representative of the MGM in Sweden, accompanied Greta Garbo , the future Mata Hari, on her first trip to Hollywood. With Lilly, Karin traveled through Tenerife, Seville, Valencia and Barcelona , where she attended the premiere of Bodas de sangre : "It was at Poliorama, she went crazy with Lorca, and established an obsessive bond with the poet. She wanted to translate the work into Swedish , and ended up publishing a book of poetry, quite naive and surrealist, entitled Cante Jondo [unpublished in Spanish]. "

Lost Lorquiana, left her mother planted, and disappeared in Barcelona, ​​moving in the most radical environments. He had a red heart. A Alcoy went to stop to collaborate as an interpreter in the construction of a hospital. But he also had one foot in Paris: "That's where they recommended it to Luis Buñuel, who was in charge of the propaganda of the Republic , among other matters. He recruited her to infiltrate between the fascists of Biarritz and Bayonne."

In his memoirs, My last sigh , Buñuel recounts his "mission in Stockholm": "I had to sustain a real conflict between my sexual desire, always alive, and my duty. He overcame my duty . We did not exchange even a kiss, and I suffered in silence". And yet something strange happened: for some reason, Lannby decided to go to the other side of the Spanish border, and was arrested. Stranger if possible: it was soon released. Some say that he got rid of the firing squad singing songs.

Back in Stockholm, he combined his acting career with his reports for the Swedish secret service, which he signed as Anette. "He also worked for the Russians, and apparently collaborated with the Nazis, " Ruvira adds. At that time, between May 1940 and spring 1942, it was when he lived with Ingmar Bergman. The future film director did not know that he slept with a triple agent, whom he called Maria. In his memoirs, Magic Lantern , he writes: "The theater used to occupy me all the time I did not spend sleeping with Maria," and describes her as "a famous person in university student associations. At night I presided over her court in a corner from the University Café, he drank cognac and smoked incessantly an American Virginia tobacco called Goldflake ».

He invited him to smoke and “it was like the flame of a blowtorch for my intellectual laziness, my spiritual dismay and confusing sentimentality. He also took care of my sexual appetite. He opened the gate and released a madman . "But he ended up surprising her with a new lover, and she, far from being intimidated, invited him to form a ménage à trois , which lasted several days. Until he got tired, and threw him out on the street.

Lannby never intervened in a Bergman movie, but it is possible to trace his erotic imprint in some of them, from Crisis (1946) to Face to Face in the Nude (1976). Maria, who after the war was renamed Cyliakus, eventually became a great star. But of international journalism. He dropped through Sicily, and as if by magic, he found the most wanted bandit in Italy, Salvatore Giuliano , with whom he spent three days and three nights. His reports went around the world, but he ended up being arrested when he asked him to return.

It can be seen in a newsletter, surrounded by dozens of carabinieri , enchanted with life. But they ended up expelling her from Italy. According to Ruvira, "it was annoying, because I was investigating the network for the escape of Nazis, who had the collaboration of the Vatican and Peron." They also tried to expel her from France, but a group of intellectuals, including Albert Camus, Pablo Picasso or Juliette Gréco, prevented it . And in France he ended up choosing tranquility. He married a former labor union priest, Louis Bouyer, who gave him a last name. She is buried in Colombes, with a good part of the names she used in her busy life.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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