This special section of the Journal is devoted to four articles based on papers presented at a 2005 conference in Oslo on intelligence in the Cold War, organised by the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies in collaboration with the international project on the Parallel History of NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
The Scandinavian countries, and particularly Norway and Sweden, played a very special role in Western efforts to gather intelligence on the Soviet Union during the first 20-odd years of the Cold War. In the first instance this was due to their geographic proximity to the northern parts of the Soviet Union and to the seas where the Soviet Baltic and Northern fleets conducted their operations and exercises. In the late 1940s and through much of the 1950s Western intelligence on the Soviet Union suffered from an almost desperate paucity of sources of information. With their strategically located listening posts as well as specially equipped ships and boats, Norway and Sweden, but also Denmark, could gather signals intelligence (Sigint) on Soviet ship movements and air operations, and locate and assess the capabilities of Soviet radar stations and networks. In addition, specially trained officers on Scandinavian cargo ships employed in Soviet import-export trades photographed port cities, harbour installations and Soviet ships.
Until not so long ago these activities of the Scandinavian intelligence services were unknown to the public, as were – and still are – the activities of the British and US agencies with whom they cooperated. A first break through the walls of silence and secrecy came when the Norwegian Ministry of Defence in 1993 decided to commission a history of the Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS) up to 1970 by an independent historian. One reason for such an unprecedented decision was a mounting wave of allegations that the secret services were undermining the civil rights of Norwegian citizens by spying on left-wing activists. The investigation of those allegations was subsequently entrusted to a special commission appointed by parliament. Footnote1 The two academics researching and writing the history of NIS could hence devote themselves to reviewing the whole range of activities that the service had been engaged in.
The NIS was part of the military establishment, but had within its remit the entire range of Norwegian foreign intelligence activities, including liaison with foreign intelligence agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the UK. Cooperation with foreign agencies is a matter which in most other countries is surrounded with particular secrecy. The publication of the history of the NIS, written on the basis of complete access to Norwegian archival and oral sources, thus meant something of a breakthrough for our knowledge of the intricate ways and means of international intelligence cooperation. Footnote2
Since that history was published, intelligence historians in other countries have tried to follow suit, albeit with mixed success due to lack of access to sources. As well as the subject of liaison arrangements, matters concerning Sigint – and especially communications intelligence (Comint) – are still jealously guarded secrets, and exempted from the hesitant efforts at declassification now under way in many Western countries. Thus the files of the giant US National Security Agency, and the much smaller but still very important Swedish Sigint agency Försvarets Radioanstalt (FRA), remain closed to outside historians.
It is therefore with particular satisfaction that we can here present three articles that break new ground for our knowledge and understanding of the role of Scandinavia in the field of Sigint, as well as that of liaison and cooperation arrangements.
Through his assiduous efforts to penetrate the veil of secrecy enveloping NSA's work in Scandinavia and with Scandinavian intelligence agencies, Matthew Aid has provided us with a mass of new information that helps us understand the strategic place and importance of the Scandinavian area in Western intelligence efforts against the Soviet Union.
In Magnus Petersson's article we get for the first time a clear view of the close intelligence cooperation that evolved between neutral Sweden and the NATO members Norway and Denmark. He then goes on to discuss the limited influence of intelligence on policy-making in Sweden.
Wilhelm Agrell, in his article, takes an analytical approach to the concept of intelligence liaison as his point of departure. Pointing to neutral Sweden's experiences as a nexus for intelligence activities by the belligerents in World War II, he then discusses the peculiar constraints facing a country that after 1945 sought to preserve its non-aligned posture while entering into far-reaching intelligence liaison arrangements with the West against the East.
On the Norwegian side, a general survey of Norwegian intelligence during the first 25 years of the Cold War is already in the public domain through the above-mentioned history, and does not need to be repeated here. But Olav Njølstad's article sheds important new light on Norway's contribution to Western knowledge of Soviet developments in the field of nuclear weapons and means of delivery. Most of the research and development that provided the groundwork for Norway's efforts in that field was done outside or on the margins of NIS, in the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment and in the Institute for Atomic Energy. As he has authored the histories of both those establishments, Njølstad is uniquely qualified to present that effort in all its aspects.
The four articles have different endpoints, and Njølstad's contribution is the only one that takes the story beyond the 1960s. This has something to do with Norway's more liberal regime of access to sources. But there is another reason: the activities of the Scandinavian intelligence services, with their heavy emphasis on Sigint, became less important during and after the 1960s. Overhead reconnaissance, initially by high altitude aircraft such as the U-2 and then by satellite, came to revolutionise intelligence collection. Photo satellites, but soon also Sigint satellites, could overfly the Soviet Union and cover vast spaces that had been out of reach for ground-based or sea-going listening platforms on the periphery of Soviet territory. Yet Norwegian intelligence, as Njølstad shows, found an important new field of activity in sub-sea acoustics, detecting and tracing the movements of Soviet nuclear submarines that were invisible to overhead reconnaissance. Geography here again gave Norway a crucial role, as ‘gatekeeper’ for the submarines of the Soviet Northern Fleet on the way from their home waters in the Barents Sea to battle stations in the Atlantic.
It would be premature at this stage to attempt a final assessment of the role and importance of Scandinavian intelligence in Western strategy and security in the Cold War. As the four articles here demonstrate, we have made great strides in our knowledge of the wide-ranging intelligence collection efforts made by Scandinavian agencies in cooperation with the Americans and the British. But collection is only a part of the intelligence cycle. Most of the all-source analysis of the information was done through the vastly greater resources of the US and UK intelligence communities, whose archives still remain largely closed. And even when those files become available it will not often be possible to assess and evaluate the importance of each single input into the finished intelligence product. It still seems a reasonable assumption that in the early period of the Cold War, when Western ignorance of the strength and weaknesses of the Soviet war machine was at its highest, the Scandinavian intelligence agencies must have provided a fair number of the most valuable pieces of the puzzle. In the 1970s and 1980s, moreover, when the nuclear submarines of the Soviet Northern Fleet exiting from their bases on the Kola peninsula presented the most serious threat to NATO's Atlantic lifeline, the ‘gatekeeping’ role performed by the Norwegian sub-sea detector chains must have played a crucial role. Here again geography was the key.
Notes
1 Dokument nr. 15 (1995–96). Rapport til Stortinget fra kommisjonen som ble nedsatt av Stortinget for å granske påstander om ulovlig overvåking av norske borgere (Lund-rapporten).[Report to Parliament from the commission appointed to investigate allegations of unlawful surveillance of Norwegian citizens.] (Oslo: Stortinget 1996).
2Olav Riste and Arnfinn Moland, ‘Strengt hemmelig’: Norsk etterretningsteneste 1945–1970 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 1997). English version in Olav Riste, The Norwegian Intelligence Service 1945–1970 (London: Frank Cass 1999).