"An official of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry was arrested and accused of espionage when he tried to take a flight from Oslo to Vienna," the agency cables reported on January 21, 1984.
It was Arne Treholt, then a rising political figure who
had accessed NATO's top official secrets
and had long been handing 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 deceit.
He was born in 1940 in the Norwegian capital, had studied Political and Economic Sciences and had begun his professional career as a journalist for the newspaper 'Arbeiderbladet', that of the Labor Party.
In the late 1960s, before he was 30, he already had contacts with the KGB.
He was not 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
admitted after his arrest what he was doing.
The Norwegian secret services had even obtained photographs of the detainee, a year earlier, walking in Vienna (Austria was a neutral city and a nest of spies throughout the Cold War) with Gennady Titov and Aleksander Lopatin, senior KGB officials of the years 80.
The Norwegian authorities had their first suspicions thanks to tips from KGB deserters and to the fact that
the FBI had investigated him during his stays in New York
as a member of the Norwegian diplomatic delegation to the United Nations.
The then press officer of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, with officials of the Soviet KGB.
Photo: AP
prison and scandal
The commotion caused by his arrest and the fact that it was proven, because he confirmed practically everything, that he
had been passing NATO secrets for years
, to which he had access as a senior foreign office in Norway, to the Soviet Union, is the biggest spy scandal in Norwegian history and one of the most serious in the Atlantic Alliance.
His case could also have been much more serious, because Treholt pointed to a future political leader.
Treholt was one of the political stars of left-wing, anti-military Norway that grew from the late 1960s and early 1970s, as in other European countries, fueled by anti-war sentiment that grew with the Vietnam War.
A former journalist who had quickly climbed the structure of the Foreign Ministry was also married to Kari Storaekre, a television star.
And for years he had influential roles much greater than those of a press relations officer, such as when he participated in the trade negotiations with the then European Economic Community or in those that established the maritime borders between the Soviet Union and Norway.
Arne Treholt, in an image from 2007, when he had already been released.
Photo: AFP
official secrets
While doing all this, he had been handing over official secrets to Moscow since at least the mid-1970s, including
his country's defense plans against a possible Soviet invasion
and the location of NATO weapons stocks in Norway.
After his arrest, the Norwegian
was sentenced to 20 years in prison, the most serious penalty
that his country's penal code allowed at the time.
He always said that he was not a spy and that if he gave information to Moscow, it was done to reduce tensions between the superpowers.
But he was never able to explain the origin of the transfers of hundreds of thousands of dollars that he had received in secret Swiss bank accounts.
He also tried to defend himself by saying that he had been blackmailed with some photographs of sexual content.
Treholt's case returned to the media in 1992 when
he was released
after just eight years in jail .
He then moved to Russia and later to Cyprus where he went into business.
He finally settled in the Russian capital.
When he got out of jail someone, who today remains anonymous, donated $100,000 to him.
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 had written articles in the press defending the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine.
Brussels, special
BC
look too
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