In his briefcase, they found 65 classified documents, including plans on how and where NATO forces in Europe, including some from the United States, would reinforce Norway in any potential conflict with the Soviet Union. The two countries shared a 120-mile border.
Mr. Treholt, 80, died in Moscow on Feb. 12, the Norwegian government confirmed, citing his family. No cause was reported. He had spent almost eight years of a 20-year prison sentence in Norway during the 1980s and early 1990s for spying for at least a decade for the Soviet Union and Iraq. The court verdict said his treachery had caused “irreparable harm” to Norway. By implication, that suggested potential damage to NATO strategy in general.
The arrest and trial was the biggest European spy drama since 1974 when West German chancellor Willy Brandt was forced to resign after his closest aide, Günter Guillaume, was found to have been spying for communist East Germany.
After Mr. Treholt’s arrest, Norwegian counterintelligence police had also found documents showing, according to prosecutors, that he had also sold Norwegian intelligence information to the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein during the 1980 to 1988 Iran-Iraq War in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed on both sides.
The Norwegians confiscated $52,000 they said had been paid by Hussein’s government for information on NATO’s assessment of the war’s progress, but the Iraqi element played only a minor part in his trial. The prosecutors found “large” but undisclosed sums of money in his secret Swiss bank account, apparently paid from the Soviet Union.
The classified documents he planned to hand over to KGB agent Gennadi Titov in Vienna included notes when he was an adviser to the Norwegian U.N. delegation in New York during the late 1970s and early ‘80s. The paperwork featured briefings involving U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and British Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington.
In September 1980, while at the United Nations, he managed via a KGB handler to get information to Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko about NATO policy over Afghanistan, which the Soviets had invaded nine months earlier. Gromyko received the information just before he met with U.S. Secretary of State Edmund Muskie and was “very pleased” with the information, according to his KGB handler, the court was told at Mr. Treholt’s trial.
Mr. Treholt, a member of the center-left Norwegian Labor Party, admitted passing information to the Soviets for many years but always insisted they were not harmful to Norway or NATO, that he was not a spy but simply trying to “build bridges” between East and West when the Cold War was its coldest.
The presiding judge at his trial, Astri Rynning, said that showed Mr. Treholt had “unreasonable and unrealistic ideas about his own importance.” The prosecution suggested blackmail may have played a role in the case, since the KGB had taken photographs of Mr. Treholt during a sex orgy in Moscow in 1975. But the accused, while not denying the photos existed, insisted they played no role in his decision to give the Soviets information.
His arrest in a busy international airport, his trial and conviction were one of the most dramatic cases of Cold War espionage, a moment when the western military alliance was particularly concerned over Soviet activity in northern Europe.
The case aroused even more interest because Mr. Treholt was the son of one of Norway’s best-known politicians, Thorstein Treholt, a former cabinet minister and member of parliament who was a regular face on Norwegian political television shows.
Mr. Treholt’s prominence also was owed to his marriage to Kari Storaekre, a popular Norwegian television personality. After his trial, she divorced him, and their 7-year-old son, Torstein, took her last name. Mr. Treholt was pardoned and released in 1992 after saying he was in bad health, but the decision was made easier by the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. He appealed unsuccessfully against his conviction and for a retrial.
He settled for years in Cyprus, where he became a businessman, importer, investor and vice president of United World Capital, a foreign-exchange trading firm in the Cypriot city of Limassol. He eventually wound up in Moscow, writing articles for Russian state media warning Norway and its NATO allies not to antagonize his new home country. He also supported Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Arne Treholt was born in the village of Brandbu, Norway, on Dec. 13, 1942. His father was then agriculture minister, and his mother was a homemaker. After graduating in politics and economics from the University of Oslo, he became a journalist at Arbeiderbladet, at the time the party organ of the Norwegian Labor Party. The publication is now called Dagsavisen.
It was widely believed that his outspoken views — he opposed Norway’s membership in NATO, protested against Greece’s military regime and marched against the Vietnam War — led to him being contacted by agents of the KGB in Norway. The Soviets viewed him as a left-wing idealist and anti-imperialist critic of U.S. policies who, because of his connections, was headed for a promising future as a political leader.
Hired as a secretary by Jens Evensen, who held a number of Norwegian ministerial posts, he had increasing access to sensitive documents, even more so after he became an adviser to the Norwegian delegation to the United Nations in New York. A spell at Norway’s defense college had also left him close to top-secret information. In his later career, he was high-profile press spokesman for his country’s foreign ministry.
Mr. Treholt’s marriages to Brit Sjorbotten and Storaekre ended in divorce. His third wife, Renée Steele, a convict he met in prison, died of AIDS in 1992, shortly before he was released. Survivors include his son and two grandchildren. In 2010, filmmaker Thomas Cappelen Malling premiered “Norwegian Ninja,” an absurdist feature that portrayed Mr. Treholt, played by actor Mads Ousdal, as a spy for the King of Norway.
“We are taking the most unpopular traitor in Norwegian history and turning him into a hero,” Malling, the subversive-minded writer and director, told the Wall Street Journal. Although it aroused interest at the Cannes Film Festival, it failed to fill seats in Norwegian cinemas.
