The Norwegian Intelligence Service, 1945-1970

Olav Riste

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135230654
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

This is a history of the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS) during the Cold War, based on its secret archives. The author describes a service that grew from a handful of specialists in 1946 to a multi-faceted organization with a personnel of about 1000 by the end of the 1960s.

1

Beginnings

THE WARTIME LEGACY

The Norwegian intelligence service (NIS) may be said to have had two or even three starting points: 1940, 1942 and 1946. Such a statement implies in the first instance that whatever intelligence activity existed before the Second World War, it never attained the breadth and level of organisation required for it to merit being called ‘a Norwegian intelligence service’. It is also meant to convey that the postwar Norwegian intelligence service could only to a very limited degree build on what had been done during the war. In most respects it had to start anew.

The situation before the war was described as follows by the person generally seen as the founder of the NIS, Alfred Roscher Lund, in the introduction to his official report on the wartime service:¹

In the General Staff this activity was part of the section on foreign armies, which took care of liaison with military attachés. A few of the younger officers had as their task to keep abreast of military developments in certain foreign countries, and their sources were mainly newspapers and periodicals … The navy had by the outbreak of war in 1939 established a bureau to receive and register reports from the various naval stations.

All this was of course in part a reflection of the parlous state in which the Norwegian armed forces found themselves after having been run down during the interwar period. The only positive development noted by Roscher Lund was that in ‘the autumn of 1939 the Ministry of Defence instituted a so-called information bureau which in fact dealt with code-breaking as well as dabbling in the field of radio monitoring’. But this was on a very limited scale.

The build-up of what was to become a large and extensive NIS, run by the Government in its wartime exile in London, had two roots.² In the occupied country, individual persons and small groups began from the autumn of 1940 to send reports, via couriers, to the Norwegian Legation in Stockholm, on the activities and military dispositions of the occupying power. At the same time Foreign Minister Halvdan Koht initiated an intelligence bureau attached to the Foreign Ministry in London and co-operating with British Military Intelligence. Koht’s motive was a combination of a desire to have the fullest possible knowledge of developments in occupied Norway, and the need to establish and maintain the closest possible contact between Norway in exile and the people on the home front: he was concerned lest the Government should lose touch with its own people.

From the end of 1940 these activities, and the co-operation with the British Secret Intelligence Service, was transferred to a newly established intelligence bureau under the Ministry of Defence – Forsvarsdepartementets Etterretningskontor, or FD/E – led by Major Finn Nagell. The actual intelligence work – the collation and analysis of enemy military activity in Norway – was, however, for the most part run by the British. Major Nagell’s FD/E had as its primary task to work with the British in recruiting, training and running NIS agents sent to operate clandestine radio transmitters on the coast of Norway, and to report on enemy shipping and naval movements.

A fully fledged Norwegian military intelligence service began to be built up from the winter of 1942, after the Norwegian Government in exile had set up a joint Defence High Command – Forsvarets Overkommando, or FO – charged with planning and preparations for the liberation of Norway. Colonel Roscher Lund, the first chief of the service, described its primary task as being

To provide the FO with an intelligence basis for its activity. It was plainly obvious that the FO could not approach the allied authorities with proposals for operations, or claim to participate in operational planning, without such a basis.

To provide allied authorities with a corresponding fund of intelligence for any allied operations on Norwegian territory … Through supplying the fullest possible intelligence on which to base all operations in occupied Norway one could ensure that the operations were successful and carried out with the least possible casualties. This would also spare the Norwegian people from loss, suffering, and material damage.

Another overriding aim was ‘to keep the intelligence service under Norwegian control to the fullest possible extent’.

The Second Bureau of the Defence High Command – FO II – subsequently merged with the Defence Ministry’s FD/E Bureau – developed into a service of a considerable size. By the end of the war it had grown into the largest section of FO, with a personnel of 223 men and women (the latter being mostly British female clerks). Its work had resulted in a massive and detailed survey of all aspects of Norwegian society – administration, communications and industry – as well as the forces and installations of the occupying power. The main sources of information were reports from persons and organisations in Norway, and interrogation of persons arriving to join the Norwegian forces being built up in the United Kingdom. A considerable underground network of intelligence organisations had developed in the occupied territory, with a network bearing the code-name XU as the largest one. Colonel Roscher Lund’s estimate of the number of agents working for the NIS in Norway during the war counted 200 agents trained in Britain and Sweden, and a further 1,800 persons classified as contacts, helpers and couriers. An intelligence section attached to the Norwegian military attaché’s office in Stockholm played a central liaison role between headquarters in London and the agents in the field.

Apart from their intelligence activities both FD/E and FO II were charged with controlling security – preventing enemy infiltration and espionage – within the Norwegian armed forces and civilian exile communities in the United Kingdom and Sweden. Historical accounts record many instances which show that this was a new and unfamiliar field of concern for Norwegians. Among more security-minded Britons the Norwegians were seen as somewhat naïve and gullible in their handling of secret information. Literature on the resistance movement in occupied Norway also has many examples from the early period when irresponsible talk had extremely serious consequences.

One aspect of intelligence work with important implications for security was cryptography – the making and breaking of codes. Co-operation with the Allies depended on their having confidence in the security of Norwegian ciphers. Norwegian cryptographic work had to be rebuilt from scratch after the occupying power assumed control of Norwegian institutions and offices which had used ciphers before and during the Norwegian campaign in 1940. This field was in a way Colonel Roscher Lund’s own ‘baby’ from before the war, and his report claims that while the Germans during the war managed to break the ciphers of many countries, Norwegian codes remained unbroken. Norwegian ciphers were used in communication between the central administration in London and the resistance organisations, the large merchant navy which played such an essential part in Allied maritime transport, and in Norwegian diplomatic correspondence. Control was exercised by a cipher council with representatives from FO II and the Foreign Ministry.

Another important element of security was the secret so-called ‘catalogue of suspects’ – a list of Norwegian nationals with ‘presumed un-national attitude’. From a number of 18,000 names in January 1943 the list had grown to include 47,000 persons in May 1945. A directive from October 1944 defined the catalogue as a register of ‘all Norwegian citizens in Norway who have been named as having in one way or another put themselves outside the national solidarity – members of the nazi party, presumed members, persons with alleged strong nazi sympathies, people who have profited excessively from work for the German occupation authorities or who have volunteered to work for the Germans, etc.’. The purpose of the list was to provide the information necessary to protect resistance work from infiltration, and the directive stressed that it was in no way meant to serve as a basis for postwar judicial proceedings against collaborators.

DOWNSIZING – AND NEW PLANS

Considering the size and achievements of the intelligence service during the war, one might have expected it to have a flying start in the postwar period. There are several reasons why this did not happen. For one thing the intelligence effort during the war had had a very peculiar orientation, being organised from abroad and directed towards the home country under foreign occupation. A peacetime NIS would of necessity have to be turned ‘inside out’, organised on home territory and directed at foreign countries. Secondly, the intelligence effort up to 1945 sprang from a self-evident need produced by a state of war and the aim of making a contribution to the liberation of the country. A peacetime intelligence service would need to be justified through a demonstrable external threat to national security, which could not be perceived during the first postwar years. A detailed plan for an extensive peacetime intelligence service, put on paper by Colonel Roscher Lund in the spring of 1944, was therefore left to gather dust in the archives for the time being.³

Reports from FO II from the summer of 1945⁴ onwards show an organisation mainly employed in tasks connected with clearing up after the German occupation. This concerned in particular a corps of controllers which became known by the initials ‘Adm.T.P’ – Administrasjon av Tysk Personell. Their job was to work with Allied counter-intelligence in investigating Germans who had been doing military, paramilitary or police service in Norway, and who were under suspicion of having committed war crimes. As many as 173 officers were engaged in those tasks by 1 September 1945. A report from FO II in January 1946, with the telling title ‘Survey of FO II’s current organisation. Possibilities for downsizing’, complained that the majority of the officers in the service were doing ‘Adm.T.P.’ work, and that most of them had applied to leave as soon as suitable civilian employment could be found. The total size of FO II at the end of 1945 was about 80 officers. Roughly 60 of them worked with ‘Adm.T.P.’, whose chief was now Major Vilhelm Evang. Nine officers worked in the security section, which was led by Lieutenant Einar Jacobsen. A small counter-espionage section numbered four officers, with Captain Kaj Martens as head, and the Cipher Section consisted of Second Lieutenant Nils Stordahl and three other officers. Finally there was an administrative section with Captain Andreas Lerheim and three other officers.

Earlier that autumn there had been a section variously called ‘Intelligence bureau’, ‘Section for operational intelligence and documentation’, or ‘Intelligence and documentation section’. Its task had initially been to issue monthly surveys based on reports from the armed services and information from Allied authorities. But in fact its most important task had been that of securing and reviewing German wartime documents, in co-operation with the documents section of Allied Land Forces Norway, the inter-Allied (from October 1945 British) headquarters of the liberation forces for Norway. But such tasks were by their nature strictly temporary. By 10 November only two officers were left in that section, and both had left by the end of the year. In January 1946 a documents office emerged as a sub-division of the ‘Adm.T.P.’ section.

In January 1946 Norway’s wartime Foreign Minister, Trygve Lie, was elected as the first Secretary-General of the United Nations. He immediately invited Colonel Roscher Lund to come with him to New York as his military adviser. Roscher Lund’s parting shot as Norwegian intelligence chief was to produce another plan for the build-up of a central military intelligence service.⁵ The most interesting aspect of that plan was the proposal for a two-pronged service: a military/operational intelligence service under the Defence High Command, and a ‘Department for defensive and special intelligence’ within the Ministry of Defence. The latter would consist of about a hundred mostly civilian intelligence specialists, compared with only about a dozen officers in the military intelligence section. Of the personnel in the intelligence department of the ministry over half should work with ciphers and communications intelligence. There should also be a liaison office charged with ‘establishing all contacts required for the collection of information and using special agents where possible and as required’.

It may be surmised that this dual organisation model reflected a traditional military scepticism towards a clandestine intelligence service. Roscher Lund justified his proposal by remarking that such a special intelligence service ought to be placed under a Cabinet minister, since its work would be of special interest to three ministries, i.e. the Ministries of Defence, Foreign Affairs and Justice. He referred to the precedents of the prewar information bureau in the Ministry of Defence, and the wartime FD/E bureau. There was also a linkage to a contemporary proposal from the national police chief which stressed the need for a high-level committee to co-ordinate all information concerning the security of the realm. Such a committee could serve as controllers for the special intelligence service.

It was in connection with this plan that Roscher Lund officially nominated Vilhelm Evang as his natural successor as intelligence chief, by naming him as his preferred candidate to run the special, secret and mainly civilian intelligence service. Vilhelm Evang was then 37 years old. He was a science graduate from the University of Oslo, and had to escape to Sweden in 1941 because of involvement in resistance activities. He was then called over to London and, although a civilian, was given a temporary officer’s commission to serve in FD/E. His work there had mostly to do with security matters, but Roscher Lund, as head of FO II into which FD/E was merged in 1944, must have noted his leadership qualities.

We do not know why the plan to have an intelligence service under the Ministry of Defence got nowhere. Instead, FO II lived on as an intelligence bureau within the Defence High Command, and from mid-1946 within the Defence Staff after the Defence High Command had been disbanded. The proposed defence budget for 1946–47 described the intelligence bureau as having five sections, one each for administration, for technical services, for communications intelligence, for passport control (based then in London), and the perennial ‘Adm.T.P.’ section. A subsequent budget proposal from January 1947 proposed a Defence Staff with four sections, one for organisation and mobilisation – FST I, an intelligence and foreign liaison section – FST II, a section for operations – FST III, and a logistics section – FST IV. Major Vilhelm Evang figures officially as Section Chief from 1 August 1947, and from 1 October the intelligence service no longer exists as FO II but as the Second Bureau of the Defence Staff, or FST II. It was later to become known as FST/E, where the E stood for etterretning or intelligence, and its full name would in the years to come change back and forth between ‘Intelligence and Foreign Liaison Staff’ and ‘Intelligence and Security Staff’. Here we shall for the sake of simplicity refer to it as the Intelligence Staff, while bearing in mind that its responsibilities up to 1965 also included military security.

NEW ACTIVITY

With regard to intelligence work as such, the most interesting part of the postwar FO II was the section which first appears in October 1945 under the name of ‘Radio control section’, dealing with locating radio transmitters and monitoring signals traffic. The section chief, Lieutenant Jon K. Brynildsen, had an ambitious programme approved by the Defence Minister which looked towards a staff of four officers and as many as 29 radio operators. One of the priorities was to locate and identify illegal radio transmitters. In Norwegian law radio transmitters could not operate without an official licence, and the right of diplomatic missions to send and receive coded me...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Abbreviations and Glossary
• 1 Beginnings
• 2 Into the Cold War: Intelligence and Security
• 3 Occupation Preparedness: ‘Stay Behind’
• 4 Through the Iron Curtain: Humint and Photint
• 5 Comint: Communications Intelligence
• 6 Electronic Intelligence (1): The Air Force as Elint Pioneer
• 7 Electronic Intelligence (2): The Norwegian Intelligence Service Takes Over
• 8 Sound Waves in the Seas: BRIDGE/SOSUS/CANASTA
• 9 Monitoring of Nuclear Tests
• 10 Telemetry: Surveillance of Space, Missiles and Satellite Activity
• 11 ‘Sets of Professional Bargains’: The Foreign Relations of the Norwegian Intelligence Service
• 12 A State Within the State? Controlling the Intelligence Service
• 13 The Uses of Intelligence
• 14 ‘Square Pegs in Round Holes’: Organisation and Personnel
• 15 Final Act for Evang
• Conclusion
• Operations and Code-Names
• Maps
• Bibliography
• Index