When KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin (1922-2004) moved to the U.K. in 1992, he took with him 25,000 pages crammed with information about Soviet espionage activities going back to the 1930s. This trove, known as the Mitrokhin Archive, has provided the material for several books, beginning with The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (1999) by Mitrokhin and historian Christopher Andrew.
In several countries, the information contained in the archive made sensational headlines and led to official investigations and trials. The Danish government, for example, funded a Centre for Cold War Studies at the University of Southern Denmark, which spent years exploring the Mitrokhin Archive and other records. The result: a 1500-page report that detailed the extent of Soviet infiltration into Danish institutions (but redacted all names). In Denmark, these revelations received extensive media coverage.
In at least one country, however, the authorities showed no interested whatsoever in exploring or publicizing the contents of the Mitrokhin Archives. We’re talking about a country that was a founding member of NATO and that is one of the most prosperous on the planet – but whose cultural elite consists disproportionately of longtime (or supposedly former) Communists.
In a word: Norway.
As new-media journalist Hans Rustad pointed out in a recent article on his widely read alternative website, document.no, the Norwegian press has been more preoccupied with trying to whitewash Arne Treholt – a Labor Party politician and diplomat convicted in the 1980s for high treason and espionage – than with uncovering the names of other Norwegians who worked for the KGB.
To be sure, there have been isolated efforts in Norway to make public some of the discoveries made in the Mitrokhin Archive. In 2000, TV journalist Alf R. Jacobsen revealed that back in 1989, the Norwegian police had learned that the KGB had cultivated Jens Stoltenberg, who was then “a young and very ambitious Labor Party politician” and who in 2000 was Prime Minister of Norway. (He is now Secretary-General of NATO.) Jacobsen’s report was condemned not only by Stoltenberg but, as Jacobsen recalled in 2011, by “pretty much all of the press’s leading commentators.” Among those who gave Jacobsen the cold shoulder was his boss, Einar Førde, “who himself had a suspect relationship to the KGB.” Meanwhile the Labor-friendly folks at the nation’s main evening news program did their best to deep-six the story.
In 2001, Norway’s largest newspaper, VG, reported on a forthcoming book that would divulge previously unreported information about Labor Party politicians’ Cold War-era KGB ties; ten years later, in 2011, another major daily, Dagbladet, reported that the book’s publication had been stopped by Labor Party leaders – and that some former KGB spies were still employed in both the Foreign Ministry and Labor Party. The media establishment responded to this revelation, too, by trying to discredit it. The book was reportedly suppressed by Thorbjørn Jagland, a Labor Party pol and former Prime Minister who in 2001 was Minister of Foreign Affairs – and who was, as it happens, one of those named in the book as KGB informants. (Jagland, famous in the U.S. mainly as the man behind Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, is currently Secretary-General of the Council of Europe.)
More to come.