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Vienna, Austria, where he was to
meet his contact man , a S ovie t
KG B officer.
The 4 2-yea r-o ld Mr. Tre ho lt
confessed afte r his a rres t tha t he
had been pass ing a long sec ret docu–
ments for severa! years.
Th e r e ve lation rocked th e
NATO high command in Brussels
and s tunned the Norwegian gov–
ernment. The accused s py was a
popula r, ris ing s tar in the opposi–
Lion Labor Pa rty and had been
touted as a future candidate for fo r–
e ign minis te r .
In hi s vari ous res po ns ibiliti es
down thro ugh the years, Mr. Tre–
h o lt ha d had access to sec rct
NATO a nd Norwegian defens e
ma te rials . Said one Foreign Minis–
try official: " Wc are truly shocked
by thc di scovery. H is pos iti o n
enabled him lo see a wide va ri c ty of
classifi ed ma teria l. "
lt
is possible that, s ince Norwe–
gian inte lli gence had s us pic io ns
about Trcholt for sorne time, they
may have purposel y screened ma te–
ria l access ible to him.
Still, eve n though the deta ils s up–
plied to the public by Norwcgian
authorities atthe time of this writing
are incomple te, some Norwegians
were a lready labeling the accused
offic ia l " the worst traitor s ince Quis–
ling"- a r e fe rence t o N orway's
de fense ministe r in the 1930s, Vid–
kun Quisling, who procla imed him–
self No rway's
Ferer
( Fuchrc r) dur–
ing the 1940-4 5 Nazi occupation.
Strat egic Region
The s ubma rinc prowlings coupled
with th c a la rming spy sc a nd a l
emphas izc once again that the Nor–
dic co untri es comprise a prime
geostra tcgic region o f the world .
They a re fa r from be ing dista n!
outpos ts of world a ffa irs.
This fact was made evident during
World Wa r 11 . On April 9, 1940.
Nazi G e rmany launched a full -scale
preemptivc blitzkrieg invas ion o f
Norway, al the same time occupying
Denmark . Norway's critica! ma ri–
time pos iti on facing th e N o rth
Atlantic Ocean on the west and Dcn–
mark 's location at the entrance to the
Ba ltic Sea made them prime ta rgets.
(Sweden managed to rema in neutra l
during the wa r.)
Just how importa nt N orway was
to the Ge rman ca use was illustra t ed
June
1984
ARCTIC OCEAN
b
Norwegian
Sea
ICELAND
NORWAY
U.S.S.R.
ATLANTIC OCEAN
by the fact that the Ger–
mans kept a garri son
force of mor e t h a n
400,000 troops the re dur–
ing the war.
After World Wa r 11,
N orway , in pa rti c ul a r ,
ass u med e ve n g r ea t e r
s tra tegic va lue. N orway,
according to J oh a n
J0rgen Holst of thc Nor–
wegian Institute of 1nter–
national Affairs, " was in
fac t ca t a pulted r a th e r
abruptly into a pivot a !
a rea as the Co ld W a r
e nveloped Eas t-Wes t re–
la tions ."
Britisb Royal Marines patrol on skis in oorthern
Norway as part of recent NATO exercises.
Mr. Hols t talked with me in his
office in Oslo only three d ays after
the spy story broke.
Due to a remate border change
which had taken effect in the Are–
tic region near the end of World
Wa r 11 , Norway found he r self to be
a front-line s ta te. A na rrow strip of
Finla nd , th e Pe t samo di s trict ,
which had previous ly sepa ra ted the
northeastern extreme li m it of or–
way from the Soviet Union , was
absorbed into the U.S.S. R. (Nor-
way, inc identa lly, stretching over
the very top of the European conti–
nent, reaches farther east tha n
lstanbul , Turkey .)
Suddenly Norway was confronted
with a 120-mile-long common bor–
der with a s upe rpower tha t, accord–
ing to Mr. Holst , " is geographically
close but ideologically distant from
Nordic Europe."
This meant tha t Norway's mos t
remole and leas t populated coun–
ty- Finnma rk- was to be a ne igh-
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