Word: treholt
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Former Diplomat, Politician and Journalist Arne Treholt, 42, was grinning last week as he entered Room 23 of the Oslo courthouse. But by the time Judge Astri Rynning finished speaking, the smile had vanished. After a 17-week trial, a panel of judges found Treholt guilty of spying for the Soviet Union and Iraq. Among the vital secrets he is believed to have passed along in ten years as an undercover agent for the KGB: details of NATO strategy and military contingency plans, alliance intelligence documents on troubled areas and Norwegian government confidential memos on meetings with world leaders. "Treholt...
...Treholt, then head of the Foreign Ministry's press office, was arrested in 1984 in Oslo just before boarding a plane for Vienna and an alleged meeting with a KGB general. He was carrying a briefcase crammed with 65 classified documents. "I wanted to arrange better relations betweeen East and West," he said, "but that does not make me a spy." The Norwegian court disagreed and sentenced him to a maximum 20 years in prison...
According to court papers made public last week, Treholt stands accused of handing over a wide array of secrets, including details of Norwegian and NATO air-defense systems, as well as reports describing the defense of Norway's strategic border with the Soviet Union. Some Western intelligence officials fear that his activities have been highly damaging to NATO...
...Treholt, a former reporter for the Norwegian Labor Party daily newspaper Arbeiderbladet, went into government service in 1973 as political secretary to the Minister for Commerce and Shipping. The next year he allegedly handed over his first secrets about NATO defenses. According to the prosecution, Treholt claimed after his arrest that he had been secretly photographed in 1975 while at an orgy in Moscow. From then on, say Norwegian officials, he was a Soviet spy. He was posted in 1979 to the Norwegian delegation to the United Nations in New York, where he regularly handed over information to a Soviet...
Immediately after his arrest, security officials say, Treholt offered to become a double agent, a gesture they refused. Treholt, who faces a jail , sentence of up to 20 years if found guilty, admits that he passed minor classified documents to KGB agents. But, he declared from the dock, "I have never on any occasion betrayed information concerning the nation's security or military secrets...