Arne Treholt, Norwegian official and Russian spy, dies at age 80

Arne Treholt was a 42-yearold Norwegian diplomat and politician tipped as a future foreign minister when he was arrested in a dramatic swoop by Norwegian authorities at Oslo Airport in 1984. He was on his way, it later emerged, to meet a KGB agent in the historic European “spy capital” of Vienna.

In his briefcase, they found 65 classified documents, including plans on how and where NATO forces in Europe, including some from the United States, would reinforce Norway in any potential conflict with the Soviet Union. The two countries shared a 120-mile border.

Treholt, 80, died in Moscow on Feb. 12, the Norwegian government confirmed, citing his family. No cause was reported. He had spent almost eight years of a 20-year prison sentence in Norway during the 1980s and early 1990s for spying for at least a decade for the Soviet Union and Iraq. The court verdict said his treachery had caused “irreparable harm” to Norway. By implication, that suggested potential damage to NATO strategy in general.

The arrest and trial was the biggest European spy drama since 1974 when West German chancellor Willy Brandt was forced to resign after his closest aide, Günter Guillaume, was found to have been spying for communist East Germany.

After Treholt was arrested, Norwegian counterintelligence police had also found documents showing, according to prosecutors, that he had also sold Norwegian intelligence information to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein amid the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed on both sides.

The Norwegians confiscated $52,000 that they said had been paid by the Hussein government for information on the NATO assessment of the war, but the Iraqi element played only a minor part in his trial. The prosecutors found “large” but undisclosed sums of money in his secret Swiss bank account, apparently paid from the Soviet Union.

The classified documents he planned to hand over to KGB agent Gennadi Titov in Vienna included notes when he was an adviser to the Norwegian delegation to the United Nations in New York during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The paperwork featured briefings involving U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington.

In September 1980, while at the United Nations, he managed through a KGB handler to get information to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko about NATO policy over Afghanistan, which the Soviets had invaded nine months earlier.

Gromyko received the information just before he met with U.S. Secretary of State Edmund Muskie and was “very pleased” with the information, according to his KGB handler.