LIDINGO, Sweden -- Back in the 1960s, the Boghammar shipyard was famous for its speedboats, the hard-charging sleek-bowed crafts whose engines propelled the pleasure craft across the water at exhilarating rates of speed.
So it was only natural that when Iran started shopping for speedboats in 1981, it turned to Boghammar, whose prize-winning shipyard is nestled on a heavily forested island near Stockholm.
The $10-million Iranian order for 50 of its RL-118 and RL-130 boats was the biggest ever for Boghammar, a privately owned company with 15 employees and average annual revenues of $3 million.
But six years later, what was once considered the company's good fortune has emerged as a national scandal with reports that Iranian Revolutionary Guards are using the boats as their key weapon in a guerrilla campaign against U.S.-flagged tankers and Navy ships in the gulf.
Some 20 Boghammar boats are already deployed for battle, a Swedish official said. Armed with heavy machine guns and crewed by Moslem fundamentalists reportedly toting rocket-propelled grenades, the speedboats are thought responsible for laying the mine that ambushed the Kuwaiti oil tanker Bridgeton on its maiden voyage under U.S. Navy escort July 24.
Recent reports are that the Revolutionary Guards may pack some of their twin-engined, aluminum hulled boats with explosives for suicide runs against the U.S. fleet.
'Swedish Iran boats in big manuever,' was the caption under a huge front-page photo in Thursday's edition of the conservative Svenska Dagbladet, the country's largest newspaper. On July 28, U.S. Embassy official Ronald Kuchel took up the matter with the government.
Suddenly, Sweden, home of the Nobel Peace Prize and avatar of non-violence as a method of settling international disputes, was wrestling with an arms-sales scandal, its third in a year.
'You can put a submachine gun on the roof of a Volkswagen and go to war,' sighed Anders Boghammar, 41, the speedboat firm's manager. 'You can't steer their intentions.'
In his factory at Lidingo, an island city of 36,000 linked by one bridge to Stockholm, stood a grey, 42.6-ft long vessel that he said was nearly identical to the speedboats now used by Iran.
The half-decked boat under construction had a cockpit in the forward section, a cabin, a three-seat deck house, and a sunken deck in the stern. The shipyard's main product is small passenger ships, but speedboats have recently also been sold as rescue launches or patrol craft to Taiwan and the United Arab Emirates.
Pictures from Iranian television have shown the Boghammar speedboats bristling with automatic weapons.
Donald Kerr, a military expert with the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies, said the Iranians had possibly bolted 14.7-mm heavy machineguns to the deck of the boats.
'The Iranians must have reinforced the bow and the stern,' Boghammar said, explaining the six-ton boats were delivered to the Iranians with an aluminum hull and deck so thin -- between three and six millimeters -- it could not support such guns.
'It is because they are thin that they are so fast,' he explained. 'Now they're probably slower because of the added weight.'
With its sleek hull and reliable, 300-horsepower Volpo Penta engines perfected during a string of 1960s Swedish ocean-racing championships, the Boghammar craft can outrace any warship in the U.S. Navy. Kerr said there is nothing comparable in the U.S. arnsenal, because modern navies do not ordinarily equip pleasure craft for combat.
The Iranian order included 40 of the larger speedboats costing $230,000 each and 10 models with slightly less horsepower for $153,000 each, Boghammar said.
All were fitted with radar, VHF radio, a gas stove, a refrigerator, beds, loudspeakers and blue external lights, he said.
The only modification the Iranians requested was an Eastern-style, standup toilet with hand railings and foot grips, Boghammar said.
Boghammar, whose grandfather founded the shipyard in 1906, said he sold the speedboats in 1981 to representatives of Iranian customs, 'who said they would hunt smugglers who used fast boats to ship consumer goods from the Saudi peninsula to Iran.'
But because the shipment was to a country at war, Boghammar first sought and received clearance from the government's War Materials Inspection office to go ahead with the sale. Under neutral Sweden's strict weapons-export laws, no military materiel may be sold to countries at war or in a war zone.
In recent weeks, however, suspicions arose that the company had illegally modified the boats for combat, but questions are soon expected to focus on Sweden's War Materials Inspection Office, which earlier this year had been accused of looking the other way when the country's arms-makers shipped war materiel to blacklisted customers.
Deputy War Material Inspector Jorgen Holgersson, who is currently investigating the sales, cleared Boghammar of any wrongdoing. In an interview,he said 'everything shows the speedboats that left here were not strengthened in any way. They were civilian products.'
Boghammar believes the speedboats, ordered and delivered to Iranian customs between 1981 and 1985, had been mobilized by Iranian defense forces as the war, 7 years old in September, dragged on.
Holgersson said he was studying the possibility of classifying speedboats as war materiel from now on, effectively stopping any further exports of the Boghammar vessels without government consent.
But that leaves the question of why the government failed to suspect Iranian motives earlier. Parliament, which reconvenes in September after a year of wrestling with scandals involving Swedish arms sales to Singapore and charges of bribes paid to Indian defense officials, is certain to take up the Boghammar matter, knowledgable sources said.
In the meantime, Iran has announced its 'Operation Martyrdom' war games last week were planned to include ramming dummy warships with speedboats that, in actual attacks on gulf shipping, would be packed with explosives and driven by suicide crews. Besides the Boghammar boats, Iran has other light craft available for the duty, Kerr said.
One major advantage of the sleek, low-slung Boghammar speedboats is that they are hard to detect with radar, Kerr said. Crewed by fanatical Revolutionary Guards brandishing armor-piercing rocket-propelled grenades, the boats could provide a new dimension to Iran's announced plans for waterborne guerrilla war with the U.S. Navy.
'Everyone in the world seems to have those,' Kerr said of the RPG-7 launcher. 'It is originally a Russian weapon now made in other countries, in particular China. A grenade launcher would pierce the plating of an escort vessel.'
The boats are too small, he said, to carry Chinese-made Silkworm missiles, but their crews could possibly roll torpedoes off the deck toward U.S. warships.
Boghammar said he would 'consider it carefully' if a new order came from Iran, whose embassy in Sweden happens to be in Lidingo.
'I don't think they would use our boats in suicide missions,' he added. 'They are so expensive.'
