Scandinavian spy drama: the intelligence chief who came under state surveillance
Lars Findsen was in police custody when he discovered that spies from Denmark’s domestic intelligence agency had tapped his phone and wired his house with bugs.
The spies, he learned, had spent months eavesdropping on his daily life at home, recording hundreds of hours of his conversations in his home, including with his three children.
It was the kind of intrusive surveillance operation normally reserved for a suspected terrorist or enemy foreign agent. Findsen was neither; he was Denmark’s top spy chief.
Findsen had spent decades working at the highest levels of the secret services. He was appointed head of the country’s foreign intelligence service in 2015. Previously, he had run its sister domestic agency which, he now understood, had been monitoring his every move.
In custody, Findsen was presented with reports from the operation. “That was the shocking thing,” he told the Guardian, “to sit and look at your life transformed into police reports written from surveillance tapes.”
This autumn, the 59-year-old spymaster is due to stand trial on charges that he disclosed state secrets to journalists and close relatives including his 84-year old mother, in a series of conversations that appear to have been recorded by the tiny listening devices that were hidden in his home.
The prosecution of such a senior intelligence official may seem extraordinary, but shortly after the proceedings get under way, a separate trial will open in which Findsen’s former boss at Denmark’s defence ministry will face similar charges.
The veteran government minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen is a towering figure in Danish politics who has held multiple senior cabinet positions. As defence minister until 2019, he oversaw the intelligence service run by Findsen.
The criminal cases have rocked Denmark, a scandal that’s turned spy against spy and thrust into the spotlight one of the country’s most closely guarded secrets – which both men now stand accused of betraying.
At stake, however, is more than the fate of two individuals. The drama has had a profoundly chilling effect on the Danish media and given rise to a slow-burning political crisis about the lengths to which an otherwise liberal European democracy is prepared to go to control its secrets.
Alarmed by the government’s handling of the affair and the criminal proceedings it is now pursuing, one of the country’s top legal professors recently asked: “What’s going on? Hello, we are in Denmark, a state governed by the rule of law. Not Belarus.”
In exclusive interviews with the Guardian, Findsen and Frederiksen have spoken for the first time with international media about how they became entangled in this often confounding series of events.
Neither the intelligence chief nor ex-minister are legally permitted to discuss the specific charges against them, and their respective trials are due to be held in highly unusual secret proceedings.
Prosecutors have charged them with offences amounting to treason under a section of the criminal code not used for more than 40 years. Under the draconian law, those found guilty can be imprisoned for up to 12 years.
Both men believe they’re innocent. Findsen has described the charges against him as “completely insane”, while Frederiksen believes his case is politically motivated, likening it to a bewildering “hoax”. “To understand what’s going on with me at the moment,” he says, “think of Kafka”.
Just one of the bizarre aspects of both cases is that the unmentionable state secrets the men are alleged to have leaked are now open secrets and widely known to relate to a long-standing intelligence partnership between Denmark and the US.
The secret deal – the “crown jewels” of Danish intelligence – was hidden from the public until details began to emerge in 2014, when documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed how European countries such as Denmark help facilitate the US’s globespanning electronic surveillance.
The disclosures have cast a long shadow over the scandal that’s ensnared Findsen and Frederiksen. The scale of western intelligence agencies’ bulk surveillance programmes may have faded from most memories. In Denmark, repercussions of Snowden’s leaks are still playing out today.
Spy turns whistleblower
On the windswept southern tip of Amager, the island immediately south of Copenhagen, there is a cluster of drab grey buildings surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence and watchful surveillance cameras. Known as “the Farm”, the site is home to Denmark’s foreign intelligence service, and it’s where one of its young officers set the story in motion.
In June 2014, the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information published a piece based on Snowden’s leaks revealing a secret agreement between the intelligence service, known as DDIS, and the US National Security Agency to tap fibre-optic cables transporting internet traffic through Denmark.
The article provided the first glimpse of one of the nation’s most sensitive secrets and appears to have caught the attention of the intelligence officer who worked as a hacker in the agency’s cyber-division.
Former colleagues said he was viewed as a rising star, though he was also known to be suspicious of the agency’s relationship with the NSA and had concerns the US was illegally collecting Danish citizens’ data.
The intelligence officer, who was in his 30s, helped launch an internal investigation, codenamed Operation Dunhammer, into whether the NSA was abusing the cable-tapping deal. When its findings were shared with senior managers, his concerns were dismissed as unfounded and he was ordered to cease the investigation.
Rather than drop it, the spy took the extraordinary step of beginning to secretly record conversations with colleagues. Conversations about the NSA partnership with Denmark’s most senior spymasters, including Lars Findsen, appear to have been among those captured over a period of several years.
Today, Findsen is sharply critical of the officer and says there was “no basis” for his actions. He was, he says, “unhinged and had his own narrative”.
In late 2019, the officer’s concerns found their way to the independent oversight body that supervises Danish intelligence, which took possession of his secret recordings – as many as 100 hours of audio – as well as the internal Dunhammer report. Behind closed doors, the spy had turned whistleblower.
A ‘historic scandal’?
In August 2020, “all hell broke loose”, a former intelligence official recalls. The independent watchdog, led by a senior judge, revealed in a brief statement that it had obtained a large amount of material from a whistleblower and listed a series of incendiary allegations about how the DDIS spy service was operating.
Among its findings, the body warned there were “risks in the central part of DDIS’s intelligence gathering capabilities that unauthorised intelligence has been gathered on Danish citizens”. The statement was not explicit, but according to former officials this was a reference to data collected under the NSA cable-tapping programme.
The fallout was immediate. Findsen and several colleagues at the agency were placed on indefinite leave. “It was not a nice situation,” says Findsen.
The media branded the findings a “historic scandal” and suggested the spies were working outside the law, effectively acting as a “state within a state”. As one front page read: “Spy chiefs accused of illegal surveillance”.
Responding to the coverage, Frederiksen, who had left the defence ministry a year earlier, defended Findsen and the other officials. “This is what triggered my involvement in this case,” Frederiksen says. “I knew them as loyal employees, dedicated and honest people, who were unjustly labelled as having done something wrong.”
In September 2020, Frederiksen publicly criticised the decision to publish the watchdog’s findings and, crucially, while defending the DDIS employees he appeared to provide the first on-the-record confirmation of the existence of the cable-tapping deal with the US glimpsed in the Snowden leaks.
Frederiksen acknowledged the arrangement again in subsequent interviews and went further in another media appearance in December 2021. “I’m going to be careful what I can say, otherwise I’ll risk a prison sentence,” he said on live TV before remarking that Denmark “greatly benefits from being allied with the NSA”.
Shortly before the interview, a government-appointed panel of judges had rejected the independent watchdog’s findings, seemingly drawing a line under the controversy.
Behind the scenes, there had been a remarkable twist. People close to Findsen were suddenly unable to contact him. It was as though he’d disappeared.
What only a few in Denmark knew was that, days earlier, a group of armed officers had stopped the spy chief at Copenhagen airport and, before anyone could notice, quietly arrested him.
‘Microphones were everywhere’
Speaking to the Guardian as he prepares for trial, Findsen appears relaxed, though there is undoubtedly a quiet anger as he describes the events of the past three years.
Released from prison in February 2022 after 70 days in custody, Findsen technically remains head of the spy agency DDIS, albeit suspended and on two-thirds salary. He says he cannot be certain he’s not still under surveillance.
Suddenly finding himself in prison, he says, was strange. “There were no other spy chiefs,” he jokes. He says he established good relations with the other prisoners. “They were much younger than me. They were there for things like drugs, arms dealing and kidnapping, so it was a different environment for me.”
Findsen’s close ties to the domestic service, which he previously ran after 9/11, added to the sense of betrayal when he came to understand colleagues had authorised a surveillance operation against him, which he believes lasted for more than a year.
“The microphones were everywhere,” he says, not just in his kitchen and living rooms, but in his car and holiday home.
In custody, he was shown the surveillance reports being used as evidence against him. His daily family life was described in the kind of documents he’d spent a career in intelligence reading. “I was talking to my children when they came back from school and things like that.”