The intriguing story of Arne Treholt, the former Soviet spy who died a few days ago in Moscow

“A Norwegian Foreign Ministry official was arrested and charged with espionage when he tried to catch a flight from Oslo to Vienna,” agency cables reported on January 21, 1984.

It was Arne Treholt, then an emerging political figure who he had had access to NATO’s highest official secrets and that he had turned them over to senior officials of the KGB, the intelligence service of the Soviet Union. He died last week in Moscow at the age of 80. It was the end of a story of intrigue and deception.

He was born in 1940 in the Norwegian capital, studied Political and Economic Sciences and began his professional career as a journalist for the Labor Party newspaper ‘Arbeiderbladet’. In the late 60s, before the age of 30, he already had contacts with the KGB.

He wasn’t just another official, even if he was simply the head of the press service. He was a diplomat with influence and access expected to have a long and important political career.

Treholt He admitted after his arrest what he was doing. Norwegian intelligence had even obtained photographs of the detainee, a year earlier, walking in Vienna (Austria was a neutral city and a haven of spies throughout the Cold War) with Gennady Titov and Aleksander Lopatin, senior KGB officials from the 1960s. 80.

The Norwegian authorities had the first suspicions thanks to the tips of the defectors of the KGB and others the FBI had investigated him during his stays in New York as a member of the Norwegian diplomatic delegation to the United Nations.

prison and scandal

The commotion caused by his arrest and the fact that it was proven, because it confirmed pretty much everything, that he had been passing NATO secrets for yearsto which he had access as high foreign ministry in Norway, in the Soviet Union, is the biggest spy scandal in Norwegian history and one of the most serious in the Atlantic Alliance.

His case could have been much more serious, because Treholt pointed to a future political leader. Treholt was one of Norway’s leftist, anti-military political stars who grew up in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as in other European countries, fueled by the anti-war sentiment that grew with the war of Vietnam.

A former journalist who had quickly climbed the Farnesina structure was also married to Kari Storaekre, a television star. And for years he had far more influential roles than press relations officer, as when he participated in trade negotiations with the then European Economic Community or those that established the maritime borders between the Soviet Union and Norway.

official secrets

While doing all of this, he had been delivering official secrets to Moscow since at least the mid-1970s, including the plans to defend your country from a possible Soviet invasion and the location of NATO weapons stockpiles in Norway.

After his arrest the Norwegian He was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the most severe penalty that his country’s penal code allowed at the time.

He always said he was not a spy and that if he gave information to Moscow it was to reduce tensions between the superpowers. But he was never able to explain the origin of the transfers of hundreds of thousands of dollars he had received into secret Swiss bank accounts. He also tried to defend himself by saying he was blackmailed with some photographs of sexual content.

Treholt’s case returned to the media in 1992, after just eight years in prison It was released. Then he moved to Russia and later to Cyprus where he went into business. Eventually he settled in the Russian capital. When he got out of prison, someone who remains anonymous today gave him $100,000. It was perhaps the last payment for his services.

Treholt left several memoirs and the Norwegian translation of Isaac Asimov’s book “Foundation” for posterity. Last year he wrote articles in the press defending Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine.

B. C