The Norwegian town where anyone might be a spy

For residents of Kirkenes, on the border of Norway and Russia, espionage is an everyday fact of life

This article was originally published on 29 Aug, 2023 by author Ian MacDougall in 1843 magazine.

 

Frode Berg was a border inspector on the brink of retirement when, in 2014, he was first recruited by the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS). Berg was based in Kirkenes, a town of 3,500 nestled amid the pine forests and rocky fjords in the north of Norway, five miles from the Russian border. Kirkenes is known for two things: its king crab and its spies. Accordingly, Berg was no stranger to the NIS and their work – his job frequently took him to Russia, and he had got to know a handful of NIS officials over the years, including the case officer who was asking for his co-operation. But he had never before been asked to take any risks on behalf of the Norwegian government. Now the case officer was asking him to transport an envelope containing €3,000 ($3,250) in cash across the border and post it to a Moscow address. A brief excursion into Russia wouldn’t seem out of the ordinary, so Berg agreed to do it. “I say yes to everything,” he told me.

 

In the ensuing months, Berg would travel to Russia six times with cash-stuffed envelopes, which he’d post as instructed. Included in each envelope would be a note describing the money as poker winnings. Over time, Berg was given a new handler, and the requests grew more involved – not just transporting and mailing money, but also, in one instance, a memory card. Berg grew increasingly uncomfortable with the arrangement. He tried to quit on several occasions, but his new handler was persistent. Finally, he acquiesced to one last assignment.

 

On his last run, just before Christmas of 2017, Berg’s worst fears were realised: he was rolled up outside his Moscow hotel by the fsb, Russia’s domestic security service. The fsb officers spirited him away to the notorious Lefortovo prison.

 

On his last run, just before Christmas of 2017, Berg’s worst fears were realised: he was rolled up outside his Moscow hotel by the FSB, Russia’s domestic security service

 

At the trial, the Russians filled in what his handlers had neglected to explain. The contents of the memory card turned out to be questions about submarine weapons systems. And the supposed recipient of the money Berg posted – a worker at a state shipyard – turned out to be a double agent. In 2019, Berg was found guilty of espionage. Seven months later, he was sent home in a prisoner exchange. When he landed in Oslo, the first words he recalls hearing were from a defence-ministry official. “Welcome home,” the official said. “We are offering you 4m kroner [about $375,000].”

 

Berg’s embroilment in the local spy scene, I would learn when I visited Kirkenes in May, is an experience shared – if to a less extreme degree – by many locals. “Everyone in Kirkenes has had a neighbour, a friend, someone in the sports club, or a fellow parent in the kindergarten who works in military intelligence,” said Thomas Nilsen, editor of the Independent Barents Observer, a newspaper that covers the region. For decades, Kirkenes and the surrounding region have been of strategic value for NATO. Its listening posts dot the craggy landscape to monitor the goings-on next door. Russia maintains several military bases in the area, including the headquarters of its Northern Fleet. The war in Ukraine has rendered this electronic snooping more urgent and, for Russia, more intolerable. The mood in the town has also shifted since the invasion. Spying, said Lena Bergeng, the mayor, has “been more of a daily theme in the community. Before we didn’t think about it, but now everybody is very aware of it.”

The Berg identity Opening image: A town square in Kirkenes. The town is in the far north of Norway, five miles from the Russian border. In 2019, Frode Berg was found guilty of espionage in Russia.

 

Locals who regularly traverse the border have, for a long time, often been approached by Norwegian intelligence officers (though since the war began there have been fewer people making such crossings). A debrief – a meeting to elicit information about Russia from a recent visitor – is the most common request. For many locals, this is an unwelcome proposition. The best prospective sources are also the people most imperilled by co-operation – those with business interests or personal connections in Russia. Rune Rafaelsen, Bergeng’s predecessor as mayor, told me that Kirkenes residents who worked in Russia used to come to his office distraught after contact from Norwegian intelligence officers. The requests could be intrusive and high risk. In one case, Rafaelsen recalled, officers from the NIS, which declined to comment on this story, asked the owner of a business with offices in Murmansk to hire one of their own, so he could use the job as cover.

 

At times, to their perplexity and irritation, Kirkenes residents are approached by both the NIS and PST – Norway’s domestic security service. Officers from one agency will turn up, ask some questions, then leave, only for officers from the other to arrive soon after and repeat the process. “They get bored answering the same questions,” said the journalist Bård Wormdal, whose new book “Spionkrigen” (“The Spy War”), chronicles espionage in Arctic Norway.

 

“Everyone in Kirkenes has had a neighbour, a friend, someone in the sports club, or a fellow parent in the kindergarten who works in military intelligence”

 

Almost everybody in Kirkenes knows who the spooks are. “When people say, ‘I work in the military,’” Torbjørn Brox Webber, a Lutheran priest who lives in Kirkenes, told me, “and you follow up with, ‘Oh, what do you do?’ If they start talking about the weather instead of answering your question, you understand you shouldn’t ask them more about it.”

 

The season of the midnight sun was almost upon Kirkenes during my visit, and the town had an uncanny feel befitting its clandestine undercurrents. By day, the sun-bleached streets had little traffic; nighttime’s half-light cast an eerie pall over the little houses – red and blue and yellow – that huddled around the fjord.

 

I met Berg beside the fjord one morning, in front of my hotel, where he’d agreed to tell me about his experiences. He has an earnest, grandfatherly demeanour with a charitable view of his fellow man – even the Norwegian intelligence officers responsible for landing him in a Moscow jail for two years.

After we picked our seats in the empty hotel café – Berg opted for a view of the entryway, our backs facing the wall – I went to get us coffee. My stomach sank when I returned to find Berg’s chair empty. I was sure I’d tripped a wire by accident and aroused his suspicion somehow. Drugged, poisoned, even irradiated drinks – they’re not just plot devices in spy flicks, after all. I was still standing there holding our mugs and pondering the situation when I saw Berg walking back from his car. He had forgotten to leave his mobile phone there, he said, a habit he’d developed when meeting people, given the many security vulnerabilities of modern smartphones. It was nothing personal.

The Russians, too, have agents among the townsfolk. During the course of Berg’s interrogation, fsb officers conveyed the depth of their insight into Kirkenes, down to the private lives of individual NIS officials. To Berg’s surprise, they even knew about alcoholism issues in the family of one of his handlers, a detail the man had guarded carefully. Other Norwegians interrogated by the fsb have reported similar revelations. In one case, Russian intelligence officers showed a Norwegian in their custody a photograph of the living room in the third-storey flat he maintained in Kirkenes, which he concluded must have been taken by a drone.

 

“When people say, ‘I work in the military’ and you follow up with, ‘Oh, what do you do?’ If they start talking about the weather instead of answering your question, you understand you shouldn’t ask them more about it”

 

Reporters first began to write about these encounters around the same time the news broke that Berg had been working for the NIS. The residents of Kirkenes reacted with astonishment. How could Russian intelligence operate so freely? Paranoia began to take hold, deterring co-operation with Norwegian authorities. One local, Rafaelsen told me, decided to forsake cross-border business altogether after being debriefed by Norwegian intelligence officers, for fear the FSB would find out and arrest him. Moscow has plenty of recruitment opportunities in the Kirkenes area, which today is home to more than 350 Russians as well as the odd Norwegian informer.

 

The spies need not even reside on the Norwegian side of the border. In 2019 a delegation of Russian Orthodox priests visited Kirkenes as part of a sister-city arrangement with Severomorsk, home to the headquarters of Russia’s Northern Fleet. They expressed an interest in a somewhat unexpected subject: management of the local drinking water. Their obliging hosts showed them a pumping station near the harbour, according to Nilsen, the newspaper editor. Two of the priests then asked to see the reservoir, located a few miles outside of town. Initially, local officials agreed. But the police chief was less enthused. After she questioned the wisdom of the plan, the delegation’s chaperones scrapped the field trip. (The sister-city relationship, too, was later terminated.)

There were plenty of reasons to be sceptical about the priests’ intentions: ties between the Orthodox church and the Russian security services are well documented, and some in Kirkenes assumed the priests were out to map the town’s supply of drinking water – useful information in any number of dark scenarios. But another line of thinking saw the request as less nefarious. According to Brox Webber, a fellow clergyman, infrastructure was a central topic of conversation when he toured Russian border towns a few years ago. The harsh Arctic climate complicates the provision of even basic modern conveniences, like running water and heating. “I’m not saying it wasn’t sketchy,” he said of the priests, “but in a place like this, people are very interested in infrastructure.”

 

In one case, Russian intelligence officers showed a Norwegian in their custody a photograph of the living room in the third-storey flat he maintained in Kirkenes, which he concluded must have been taken by a drone

 

The incident illustrated the ambiguity of these borderland spy games. There’s plenty of real espionage, and downplaying the threat risks playing into the hands of the intelligence agencies. Succumbing to paranoia, however, carries its own risks: its crying-wolf effect undermines efforts to detect the threat posed by actual spies. Social trust and a sense of community are traded for shadowboxing enemies who often aren’t there. Locals have their suspicions about who among them might be co-operating with the FSB, but most try to stave off the monomania that can flower if that sort of thinking takes root. “If you walk around thinking every single Russian here in Kirkenes is a spy, then you’ll become very afraid,” Webber told me. Nor was it a major worry for Gunnar Reinholdtsen, who worked as NIS site chief for two decades before retiring three years ago. “It has been a concern in the service,” he said. “They say, ‘Oh, Kirkenes, there are too many Russians there.’ But there are more Russians in Oslo.”

 

When I arrived in town, Kirkenes was one of the few ports in Europe to remain open to the Russian fishing fleet after the invasion of Ukraine. The harbour dominates much of the waterfront, a kilometre of concrete clustered with warehouses and strewn with tall stacks of king-crab traps. Half a dozen or so barnacled piers jut out into the fjord. In ordinary times, boats would call into the harbour up to 800 times each year; around half of them would be Russian fishing vessels docking for crew changes, resupply and repair. Now that Russian day trippers have disappeared, the local economy is more dependent than ever on these fishing vessels. Days before I arrived in town, a shift in sanctions policy in Oslo looked poised to bar shipyards from working on Russian trawlers altogether – a move that threatened to all but shut down the docks in Kirkenes.

The Russian boats bring in money, but attitudes towards them had nevertheless soured by the time I visited. Bergeng, the mayor, attributed the shift not only to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but also to “Skyggekrigen” (“The Shadow War”), a three-part documentary produced by the national broadcasters of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, which alleged that many Russian fishing and research vessels were doing double duty spying or laying the groundwork for future acts of sabotage.

 

Indeed, Russian fishermen calling at Kirkenes had recently been behaving oddly. Last summer, a skiff was dropped off a trawler and motored to the Strømmen bridge, a restricted military zone, raising fears the Russians were casing it. In January, two fishermen took a stroll through town in outfits that bore a strong resemblance to Russian military uniforms, earning the ship’s captain a rebuke from local police. Kirkenes can be described as a kind of laboratory, Nilsen, the newspaper editor, told me. “They’re testing Norwegian authorities. How far can you push the limit before the police interfere? What will Norway accept?”

 

On May 17th Norway celebrates its Constitution Day. Norwegians dust off their bunads – ornate woollen outfits that make them look like 19th-century peasants off to church – to march around town carrying national flags and greet one another with the merry salutation ordinarily reserved for wishing somebody “happy birthday”. The weather had turned that day and, caught in the rain, I sought shelter in Pavilion Park. I’d heard that Russian vandals had tagged the pavilion with pro-war graffiti, but by the time I got there, it was gone.

 

“If you walk around thinking every single Russian here in Kirkenes is a spy, then you’ll become very afraid”

 

After a few minutes, two middle-aged women came tottering up the pavilion steps, speaking Russian in hushed tones. One was slight and jumpy, her jacket hood drawn tight over her hair. Her companion, by contrast, had a composed, matronly demeanour. They seemed not to notice me at first, but halfway up the steps the first woman started and nudged her friend, who suddenly came alive, as if getting into character. “Oh, happy birthday,” she said, in halting Norwegian. The two women, I noticed, each held Norwegian flags. I asked them if they’d been to the morning children’s parade. The first woman looked nervous. Her friend shook her head. A silence lingered. Finally, the second woman turned out her palms and said in broken Norwegian, “We’re just two old ladies.” It was a weird thing to say, as though they were intent on allaying suspicions I hadn’t expressed.

 

The rain soon let up and I left the two women, who were speaking quietly to one another in the pavilion. As I looked back, they appeared to be staring in my direction and conferring. The encounter left me ill at ease. I decided to take a lap around the neighbourhood.

Once I returned, the two middle-aged women were gone, replaced by a younger woman with rust-coloured hair. She sat on a bench, staring rapt at her phone, as if she were transmitting a message of great consequence. When she noticed me climbing the pavilion steps, she hurriedly thrust her phone into a case and glared at me. I gathered I’d intruded on something important. A greeting in Norwegian elicited nothing other than her still-unflinching glare.

 

On my walk back to the hotel, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I’d seen one of the women – the matron – somewhere before. I soon found her in my research file, among screenshots of the Russian consulate’s Twitter feed. There she was, attending a controversial commemoration of the Soviet Union’s role in driving the Nazis out of Norway, held the week before at a hilltop monument in the centre of Kirkenes that depicts a victorious Soviet soldier. The ceremony was a fractious and jingoistic affair: a pair of Russians tore down a placard memorialising the summary execution of a Ukrainian prisoner-of-war. On revisiting the consulate’s feed, I stumbled upon another familiar face – the woman with the rust-coloured hair. She was holding a bouquet of roses at a second-world-war memorial last autumn.

 

I couldn’t tell what any of this meant. Probably nothing. But then again, maybe something? It was possible, after a few days under the near-midnight sun, immersed in the spy stories of Kirkenes, that I was also succumbing to paranoia and mistrust. There wasn’t much time to make further inquiries – I was leaving town in the morning – but I thought I’d see if I might run into any of my fellow pavilion-goers at the afternoon parade. I didn’t, but the occasion wasn’t without its cloak-and-dagger intrigue. PST counter-intelligence agents were out, Rafaelsen, the former mayor, told me, keeping tabs on who among the locals were getting friendly with the Russians. “I know them very well,” Rafaelsen said of the agents. “These are family people.” Yet today, on a holiday Norwegians traditionally spend with family, they were walking the town alone. Rafaelsen had recognised one of them as the agent who had debriefed him a year earlier about his travel abroad, his foreign contacts and the like – only to realise she appeared to be following him. He’d laughed at her and gone on his way.

 

For locals, encounters of that sort are simply part of life. But as a visitor, I found the surveillance somewhat unnerving. On my stroll through town earlier in the day, I recalled, I’d noticed a number of loners in dark suits – standard May 17th wear for those who forgo the bunad – milling around. Were they counter-intelligence agents? And what, I wondered, would they – or had they – made of my encounters in the pavilion? It was a useful reminder of the primary hurdle for intelligence gathering in a town as small as Kirkenes. In places like this, it’s hard to keep things under wraps.