The Stockholm daily Dagens Nyheter recently reported that a senior officer in the Swedish Armed Forces worked there for years on the strength of a completely false résumé. The man, who has not been named, claimed to have been a British helicopter pilot who’d survived being shot down in the Gulf War and to have been a commodore in the Royal Navy, but in fact he’d never been anything more than a civilian engineer working on electrical systems.
“It’s a serious matter,” the human-resources chief for the Swedish Armed Forces told the paper. “It is dreadful. It’s difficult for the defense forces to protect themselves against liars.” But what makes the story really extraordinary is that it is the second such case to emerge this year. Last winter Dagens Nyheter revealed that a rather more senior staff officer had simply faked his résumé, claiming qualifications he did not have and which were never checked.
