Was Swede who abandoned his family a secret Mossad agent?

The myth of the Mossad is so great, some in Sweden claim that a man who lied about his identity and abandoned his family cannot possibly be a simple con artist - but must be a member of the Mossad. In any case, this is what has surfaced from a story that appeared in the Swedish newspaper Expressen about Johanna Wallin, a 33-year-old woman searching for her father, Peter Reginald Tonge.

According to the article, Tonge arrived in Sweden in 1975, saying he was looking for friends he'd made while working on a kibbutz near Haifa. He met Maria Wallin at a party in Stockholm and three months later they were married and moved to Uppsala. The marriage granted him a permit to reside in Sweden, the newspaper said.

In a declaration to Swedish authorities, he stated he was a British citizen with a degree in agriculture from a university in Bristol. He also said his mother's name was originally Margret Bergman, and that she was born in Poland in 1913 and had escaped to Britain as a refugee. His father, however, was a Swede whose last name was Eriksson, and who died when Tonge was a child. The name Tonge, he claimed, came from his stepfather from his mother's second marriage.

Expressen and Johanna Wallin have requested that Haaretz publish the story, hoping it will help locate Tonge. Johanna says she has been searching all her life for her father, who abandoned her and her mother when Johanna was 6, a short time before her sister was born. Her search, which took her all the way to Eilat, has been detailed in a book recently published in Sweden.

According to Johanna, her mother told her that her father claimed to have worked in Eilat in the 1960s at a place called Harry's Bar, which closed down a long time ago. Johanna managed to find the owner, now 83 years old, and showed him a photograph of Tonge. He did not recognize the man in the picture.

Johanna says she has investigated details her father told her mother about his past, but cannot confirm any of them. "The people he said he knew or met don't exist," she says, "and I didn't find one Tonge who studied at either of the two universities in Bristol."

A Swedish security expert, Joakim von Braun, told Expressen reporter Lars Palmborg that the pattern of behavior exhibited by Peter Tonge - or whatever his name really is - will likely indicate that he was a Mossad agent who came to Sweden to hunt Palestinian terrorists. But Johanna Wallin is not convinced.

"I am also very doubtful that my father was an agent. It is not a theory that I have ever put forward, but the fact is that he used a false identity and that the identity which he used while in Sweden and Israel, i.e. Peter Reginald Tonge, disappeared in 1981. I hope that the story in Haaretz will help me to [find him]."