The New Yorker Sept 16 2024

The Dark Time

• On the emerging espionage war between Norway and Russia.

Until Russian annexed Crimea, the Norwegian security services did not publicly refer to the FSB, Russia’s largest intelligence agency, as an adversary. Then, Roaldsnes said, “you had to get in touch with your counterintelligence people from the Cold War, dust them off, gather their insights, and get back to work.

• In 2015 Russia sent streams of asylum seekers into the Arctic border with Norway. With intelligence tasks.

• “The Russians no longer have any downsides to an operation being exposed ... They ruined a great spy game with this stupid war.”

• “The F.S.B., operating through various cover organizations, has spent decades engaging in ideological subversion in Kirkenes, rooted in the manipulation of local history, in order to make the region more friendly to Russia. ‘You can use this area to create chaos,’ Roaldsnes told me. I think I admire Russia. For its tenacity and long term commitment to its own story and history. It is a country that recognizes the power of the stories told about oneself. The power of appearances. If something in the world doesn't bend toward your purposes, throw words and stories at it. Think it through and do it in a plain baldfaced manner - look into the listener's eyes when you tell them their land isn't what they believed it to be - it's actually ours, and here's why. Then spout the manufactured history - and the people will buy it - and the world at large will buy it. And you will be admired as a harbringer of a new era - a new era which reconstitutes the distant past and sets things to proper rights. To be made great again, as it once and always was. Waving a magic wand of myth over the entire world.