If Alf R. Jacobsen is right, much of the Labor Party’s foreign policy for decades was influenced by the KGB.
The comments expresses the writer’s opinions.
Was Treholt alone? This is the question that has been whispered in the hooks since the bureau chief and the Labor politician were arrested on their way to Vienna with the stress suitcase full of documents on 20 January 1984.
Alf R. Jacobsen’s latest book, “Stalin’s Whip”, tries to give us the answer.
Jacobsen is perhaps Norway’s most deserving digging journalist. He revealed Jahre, and he is the best editor NRK’s Brennpunkt has ever had.
Stormannsgal hedonist
The book begins in the Norwegian embassy in Moscow, where Ambassador Rolf Andvord was Norway’s envoy to Stalin during World War II. In the Norwegian Biographical Lexicon, Andvord has received the following afterword: «The posterity has to some extent questioned Andvord’s judgment in certain situations. In his autobiography, he tells how he, as ambassador to the USSR, initiated a collaboration with the NKVD, allegedly with a view to strengthening the Soviet government’s belief in the Western Allies’ honest will both to persevere and to give Russia its full support.
The time to question Andvard’s judgment is probably over.
In Jacobsen’s book, Andvord appears as a megalomaniac, a homosexual hedonist who with the greatest pleasure wanders into the KGB’s honey trap.
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Was not alone
In that trap, two other embassy employees soon joined him. According to Jacobsen, a direct line goes via Tryvve Lie via Andvord. The man we were all so proud of was the UN Secretary-General, but who in this book appears to be a puppet of the Soviet Union.
Gay Foreign Ministry employees in Moscow were not alone in enjoying the KGB’s sexual services in exchange for influence, according to Jacobsen. His most piquant case is Einar Gerhardsen’s wife Werna. She allegedly jumped into bed with a specially ordered KGB stallion during a fraternity visit to the Soviet Union. Whereupon the stallion must have been sent to Oslo to continue the courtesy, and not least the influence of the father of the country through his wife.
Recently deceased Rune Gerhardsen said the following to NRK about the relationship: “Actually, this is not so important to me today, I would have been just as fond of my mother anyway.”
It is nice that Rune Gerhardsen treated his mother to love at the expense of the KGB, but let’s hope it arouses a little more interest among historians.
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More than just robbery stories
Retold like this, one can get the impression that Jacobsen’s book is first and foremost a collection of robbery stories.
It is much more than that.
Jacobsen shows how the KGB on three occasions was close to changing Norwegian foreign policy.
The first occasion was during World War II when Andvord and Lie played statesmen and offered a defense pact where Norway was to defend Svalbard together with the Soviet Union.
The second occasion was in 1957, when Einar Gerhardsen traveled to Paris and said no to American medium-range missiles. Again, Andvord was central, and proposed nothing less than that he, together with Khrushchev and Eisenhower, should negotiate world peace in isolation on a Norwegian merchant vessel.
This megalomania still seems to be well known in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs today.
Well known in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
The last time was in 1980, when the left-wing opposition in the Labor Party was keen to make Norway a “nuclear-weapon-free” zone.
One of the central proponents of this was Thorbjørn Jagland, who together with Arne Treholt edited the book on “Nuclear weapons and insecurity policy.”
A co-editor who was paid by the KGB citizen for professional knowledge. But it may have influenced the content of the book.
Jacobsen’s book documents that the KGB has for decades tried to influence Norwegian foreign policy, and that they have succeeded to a great extent. At least one prime minister’s wife, a minister, and a foreign minister collaborated with the KGB, and later NRK chief, Einar Førde, probably leaked to the KGB from meetings in prison with Treholt, according to Jacobsen.
This has more than historical interest.
Dangerous diplomats
First, the book shows how life-threatening Norwegian diplomats, who should not only protect Norwegian interests, but become international statesmen, can become.
Terje Røed Larsen or Kjell Magne Bondevik’s private peace initiative appear as close relatives of Rolf Andvord and Arne Treholt’s exaggerated self-images. In the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Labor Party, there has obviously been a culture for decades of being anointed by the KGB.
Røed Larsen’s money from a pedophile man in search of influence, and Bondevik’s zeal for Saudi Arabian gentle gifts, is thus part of a kind of tradition.
We were lucky with the KGB, will it go just as well with Saudi Arabia or China?
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Naive Norwegians
Secondly, the book shows how naive we Norwegians are in the face of dictatorial regimes and their henchmen. Coal after coal with politicians and journalists thought it was extremely useful to party with the KGB.
You can say what you want about young AUF members who think they will influence the Soviet Union by being offered some drinks by the KGB, but self-confidence is not lacking.
Such naivety in the face of evil can be costly personally. It shows the fate of Treholt, but worse: It can ultimately cost us as a country freedom.
There is one reason why quisling is an insult.
“Stalin’s Whip” is a great book. It is entertaining, and well written.
However: Some of the allegations in the book appear to be undocumented. Arne Ording was obviously Soviet-friendly, but Jacobsen does not provide any evidence that he was in fact a KGB agent, other than that British intelligence suspected this. The same is the case with Trygve Lie.
None of this touches on the book’s main theses. What Jacobsen writes about both Andvord, Gerhardsen, Bøe and Førde appears to be well-founded.
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Crowded around him
One point that Jacobsen does not reflect on is why the KGB’s influencing agents failed after all. The Labor Party went for Marshall aid and NATO. The Communists were marginalized.
Is the time come for a revaluation of hawks like Haakon Lie? When Lie saw communist infiltrators everywhere, it was a well-founded fear. With a prime minister’s wife at the helm of the KGB, there was reason to be concerned for national security. And if he thought that SF was the lacquer of the GDR, then that was a precise description.
Read more from the Norwegian debate
That Thorbjørn Jagland almost in a panic, according to Jacobsen, shut down the search for Norwegian names in the Stasi archives, goes into a slightly different tradition – to put it nicely.
Alf R. Jacobsen has given us the answer to the question of whether Treholt was alone:
No, it was crowded around him.
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