Norwegian Intelligence Service

Norwegian Intelligence Service   (Intelligence service, Norway/Military)
Formation	1915
Headquarters	Oslo
The most powerful deep state entity in Norway

The Norwegian Intelligence Service (NIS) (Norwegian: Etterretningstjenesten. E-tjenesten) is a Norwegian military intelligence agency.

Legal right to lie

The law on the agency § 11-4 states that "In order to protect its operations, the Intelligence Service may use cover structures and incorrect, false or misleading identities, documents and information, as well as take control of, modify or deploy electronic equipment. Provisions on the duty of disclosure in other laws do not apply to information about remuneration that the Intelligence Service provides to sources and contractors who are not employed in the service." The government "may make provisions derogating from other laws, including the requirement to report information to public registers, to the extent necessary to protect the Intelligence Service's employees, sources, capacities, methods or operations from public exposure or compromise other states."

Secret archive over Norwegian leaders

In 2016, it was exposed that the Service stores large amounts of personal information about more than 400 Norwegians who the Intelligence Service wanted to recruit or keep as confidential informants. The archive also contains sensitive information about the persons' immediate family members. The entries in the archive, which have existed "for a number of years", are psychological profiles of leaders in Norwegian society who travel a lot abroad - among other business people, bureaucrats and academics. The archive has for years been kept away from the the parliament's control body for the Secret Service, the EOS Committee.

Trond Johansen

Full article: Trond Johansen

Trond Johansen, while formally never a leader of NIS, had a dominate position over the agency for five decades.

Deep state control

In an interview, Egil Eikanger stated that he himself had been bugged when he was leader of the Service. The bugging happened through his phone, which also allowed for bugging his home (room surveillance), including highly confidential conversations. Eikanger hinted strongly that Trond Johansen, formally his subordinate, was the person responsible for the surveillance, possibly on a mission from the CIA or NSA.

Surveillance of the Borten government

Per Borten stated on TV in 1991 with reference to his time as prime minister:

There is no doubt that the phone was tapped, but I have no idea about who would have done it.

According to Attorney General L. J. Dorenfeldt, the case was investigated for 5 years without anything being able to be proved or disproved.

Borten told in 1999 how:

The prime minister was visited by two US intelligence officers, who asked Borten to leave his office while they worked, allegedly to uncover secret microphones... I know today that these were intelligence people, and I am convinced that they had close contact with the Norwegian intelligence service. ... The most important purpose, by all accounts, was to install the most advanced eavesdropping equipment in my office."

Surveillance of the Willoch government

In the spring of 1982, Erling Norvik, then state secretary in the Kåre Willoch government, received a number of inquiries from several officers, two of whom in particular warned that wiretapping of the government occurred as part of illegal wiretapping by parts of the Norwegian Intelligence Service, that there was confusion between party politics and professional intelligence and that there was the need to look more closely at the control of foreign services' activities in Norway. Norvik alerted Willoch, who left the case to defense minister Anders Sjaastad. Sjaastad then asked people in the agency, who answered that the accusation was nonsense, and the case did not go further.

Surveillance of the Syse goverment

In a 1994 interview with VG, former prime minister Jan P. Syse told how he "discovered evidence of eavesdropping on his home phone at the end of his prime ministerial term. ... People who called him experienced having the last part of the call played back after Syse had hung up...Syse has never wanted to make a fuss of the experiences he had with his private phone as prime minister. But privately, Syse has expressed fear that he was bugged. The strange phone experiences upset both co-workers, party members and friends. Besides the fact that parts of the phone calls were replayed to people on the other end of the line, there were noises and abnormal sounds in Syse's private phone. Syse's private phone behaved so strangely that Syse eventually changed both the phone and the phone number." The story was dismissed to the newspaper by "persons with expertise in intelligence and surveillance issues".

However, the technical limitations of room surveillance in the era meant that there was a risk of discovery, by the conservation being played back for technical reasons. The eavesdroppers were likely the deep state Alfa or the Norwegian Intelligence Service.

US collaboration

Norway's chief of defence from 1989 to 1994, Toralf Rein, has said that Norway was the United States' most important intelligence partner during his period as leader. Several former Norwegian intelligence chiefs have said that Norway was one of America's most important partners in their periods.

NTOC, a cyber division of the NSA, has ranked the NIS as one of its two closest foreign partners. The intelligence community and NSA collect and share cyber data on the Russian political leadership.

Funding by the United States

The agency has long been majority funded by the United States.

Fredrik Sejersted, then a lawyer with the attorney general, wrote in 2005 that the US and NATO financed more than 90 percent of the NIS's budget in the early 1990s. Historian Rolf Tamnes wrote that aprroximately 70% of the intelligence workers were paid by the U.S. government in the late 1960s. As recently as 1992, half of the employees worked in projects paid by the United States

50 percent of the agency's activities in 1991 was funded by the United States. Officer Tormod Heier wrote that American intelligence paid more than 90 percent of the budget to the NIS in the mid-1990s. A key source in the NIS has also said that the Americans for a period allocated so large sums to the intelligence service that the Norwegians were unable to use up all of it. What then happened was that money was returned to an account in the United States, money that could later be used for Norwegian intelligence. At the turn of the millennium, there was allegedly NOK 100 million in this account.

In 2005, the government allocated NOK 691 million to the agency. In 2020, a budget of NOK 2.3 billion was proposed. How much the additional US funding is, is not known.

Cover-up of Mehamn accident

Full article: Mehamn Accident

The Norwegian Intelligence Service covered up real course of events in the 1982 Mehamn accident.

Drug smuggling

The crime fiction writer Anne Holt worked as a lawyer at Oslo police. In her debut novel, Blind Goddess she, based on her experiences from Oslo police, described a drug ring run by well-known Oslo lawyers and protected by the ministry because the proceeds went illegal operations of the NIS.

 

A Norwegian Intelligence Service victim on Wikispooks

Title	Description
Per Borten	Norwegian prime minister spied upon by the US and "his own" spooks.

 

Employees on Wikispooks

Employee	Job	Appointed	End
Trond Johansen	Intelligence liaison	1954	1958
Trond Johansen	Spook

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2 February 2025 Terje 

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