sentenced to twenty years in prison in 1985 after being found guilty of espionage on behalf of the KGB, the former journalist, secretary of state and diplomat had been pardoned seven years later. He died on February 12 in Moscow, at the age of 80 years.
by Anne-Françoise Hiver (Malmö (Sweden), regional correspondent)
Passed to posterity, the photo is part of the proofs that overwhelmed it. Black suit and white shirt, Arne Treholt walks in a street in Vienna, summer 1983, accompanied by two KGB agents, including General Gennadij Titov, expelled from Norway in 1977 due to a espionage affair. In great discussion, the three men seem to laugh with deployed throat. We are then in the middle of the Cold War. Arne Treholt returns from the United States, where he officiated for three years as an advisor to the Norway ambassador to the United Nations. He has just been appointed head of the communication service at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in Oslo.
Six months later, in January 1984, his arrest will plunge the country into dismay. His conviction to twenty years in prison for espionage, in 1985, will remain “a scar in Norwegian post-war history”, according to the daily Aftenposten, which announced, Sunday, February 12, death in Moscow of the spy The most famous in the Scandinavian kingdom.
Until the end, Arne Treholt said that he wanted to build bridges between the east and the west, without ever providing his contacts with the slightest information that could have endangered the security of his country. However, he was grave paid by the KGB, but also by the Iraqi secret services, with which he had come into contact in New York.
Meeting with KGB agents
The news of his arrest, in the summer of 1984, caused a shock wave in the high spheres of the Norwegian society. Because Arne Treholt knew almost everyone. His father, Thorstein Treholt, figure of the Labor Party, was Minister of Agriculture in the early 1970s. He himself embodied in 1964.
Journalist at the foreign service of the left daily newspaper Arbeiderbladet, he became friends with lawyer Jens Evensen, who, who became Minister of Trade and Maritime Affairs in 1973, made him his political secretary, then his secretary of ‘State. At the time, Norway hired negotiations on the “gray zone” with the USSR that the two countries in the Barent Sea are competed. A fishing agreement will finally be signed in 1978.
For ten years already, Arne Treholt regularly meets KGB agents in Oslo. When the former journalist was appointed to New York in 1979, the Norwegian intelligence services, already suspicious, contacted the FBI. Two American secret agents settled near his home. Pretending to be his neighbors, they watch him.
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