Sweden's week-long hunt for a "Russian submarine widely anticipated by military specialists and the media" produced nothing more than a 2.2 million euro invoice and a blurry photograph of ... the Loch Ness Monster?
To add insult to injury, a Swedish signal intelligence (SIGINT) source told the Dagens Nyheter daily that there was no distress call from a damaged Russian sub, as was widely reported by the media last week:
Another triumph for yellow journalism as Russia remains under a cloud of suspicion for something that never happened
Citing freedom of information requests and its own sources, the paper said Sweden’s signal intelligence agency knows nothing about the alleged distress calls, and registered no spikes in communication with Kaliningrad at the time.
“I’d be glad to read about that emergency call myself. But it didn’t happen, this information is incorrect,” the newspaper cites a source as saying.
And although military specialists and the media were "anticipating" a big scary Russian nuclear submarine invasion, the search did turn up a "man in black allegedly hunted by special intelligence who was revealed to be a pensioner fishing for sea trout."
The Russian Defense Ministry dismissed the hysterical sub hunt as a "tragicomedy." Do they have blurry photographs to back up those strong words?
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