Elisabeth Braw is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the author of “Goodbye Globalization” and a regular columnist for POLITICO.
In exemplary coordination, Norway’s intelligence agencies have released their annual reports — and they make for troubling reading.
All three documents chronicle the innovative ways in which Russia and China, as well as Iran and North Korea, go about gathering intelligence now that the usual embassy route has become much harder for them.
The Norwegian agencies highlight a range of espionage activities, from civilian mariners scouting offshore installations to undercover agents spying on every aspect of daily life. And the reports make for useful reading far beyond Norway’s borders.
Espionage against Western countries never ceased — not even in the most harmonious years after the end of the Cold War — but it has been growing for years now. And until the invasion of Ukraine, many Russian spooks worked under official cover at Russia’s embassies in European capitals. However, after the invasion, Western governments expelled more than 400 of them.
“We expect that Russia will try to compensate for the loss of the intelligence officers. They can do this, among other things, by sending more visiting agents and recruiting sources via digital contact,” notes Norwegian Police Security Service (PST), the agency in charge of interior security and counterintelligence, in its 2024 report.
In other words, there will be more cases like that of Jose Assis Giammaria, a supposed Brazilian academic who took up a post at a Norwegian university in 2021 and was unmasked as Russian undercover officer the following year. He’s now awaiting trial.
Innovative espionage efforts are, in fact, a paradoxical outcome of Western sanctions against Russia. Sanctions were supposed to cripple Russian espionage. Instead, the country’s spy chiefs have stepped up espionage involving individuals working under deep cover, posing as ordinary members of society.
Such agents are, of course, much harder to identify and track because, unlike intelligence officers under official cover, they don’t require diplomatic visas. Indeed, they may not need any visas at all — they may even be local citizens or pose as such. “While Russia is still seeking to station intelligence officers under diplomatic cover, it will have to find ways of compensating for the human intelligence shortfall, such as by increasingly adopting other forms of covert operation abroad,” Antti Pelttari, the director of the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service, told POLITICO last April.
And it’s not just Russia. China’s intelligence services, too, avail themselves of all manner of people with legitimate reasons to be in Norway, Finland or any other Western country. For example, PST reports that “Chinese intelligence and influence activities in Norway are carried out to a large extent by intermediaries, Chinese state-owned and private companies, organisations, academic institutions and think tanks.”
So, who is an ordinary academic and businessperson, and who is a spy? For us ordinary citizens, it’s virtually impossible to tell. “On larger [business] projects, state and private Chinese companies often act in consortia. With overlapping ownership interests, the Chinese state is represented throughout the value chain. Often Chinese companies use subcontractors who also have links to the Chinese authorities,” Norway’s military intelligence agency, Etterretningstjenesten, notes in its report.
But the challenge facing Norway and other Western countries isn’t just that foreign spies are becoming harder to identify — it’s also that they’re monitoring everything. “Cooperation in research, business and political relations makes Norway an accessible intelligence and influence target for China,” PST reports.
A couple decades ago, business and academia were havens of transnational collaboration, though IP theft was a headache. But today, researchers are as vulnerable to Russian and Chinese espionage as government institutions, and this will only increase in coming years.
Iran has similarly expansive interests, though it appears to focus on gaining access to cutting-edge technology developed at universities and R&D labs. Of course, Tehran’s objective is to put the technology to military use. According to PST, North Korea also conducts cyber intrusion against Norway to gain access to pioneering research (and, in typical North Korean fashion, to also steal money).
And there’s one part of modern Western society that’s even more vulnerable to espionage and its resulting harms than others : sea-based infrastructure.
For decades, merchant and research vessels have violated maritime rules to also conduct espionage. And in recent years, as fleets have grown, so has the espionage. In a January report, the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that 80 percent of China’s research vessels had links that suggested “involvement in Beijing’s geopolitical agenda.”
PST reports that merchant vessels conduct espionage in Norwegian waters, and that this may involve the mapping or sabotage of sea-based infrastructure, or that these vessels might deliberately cause accidents to identify weaknesses in Norwegian preparedness or response.
This matters because, Norway has become a key supplier of energy to Europe, especially since the invasion of Ukraine and the demise of the Nord Stream pipelines. This oil and gas is pumped from off-shore platforms and is then transported through pipelines that crisscross European waters.
“Russia has mapped Norway’s critical oil and gas infrastructure over several years,” Norway’s military intelligence service notes. “Such mapping is still ongoing, both physically and in the digital space. This knowledge can be important in a conflict situation.” Before Nord Stream was sabotaged, someone had mapped it too.
Constant attention is also being paid to undersea communications cables. Their location is public knowledge, laid out in maps that fishermen and others use, but in reality individual cables are hard to locate, as the seabed may cause them to move slightly in one direction or another. Against this backdrop, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Russian military and civilian vessels have simply parked themselves off the coast of Ireland multiple times, in waters hosting a large concentration of undersea cables connecting Northern Europe and the U.S. East Coast.
“Our foes press on from every side,” reads the English translation of one of the lines in St Augustine’s famous prayer “O Salutaris Hostia.” The espionage being conducted against us today is all-encompassing in its ambition, methods and the tools it employs. (And no, Western countries are no angels, but they don’t target other countries with such ferocity.)
Though the reports from the three Norwegian agencies naturally concern Norway, their findings apply to all Western countries. Might a colleague be another Jose Assis Giammaria? Might a ship sailing near a pipeline be scouting it out or innocently traveling to its destination? Is a business contact just a business contact, or might they be acting at China’s behest?
Knowing about the massive amounts of spying taking place can make one paranoid. But the best antidote to widespread espionage isn’t fear but awareness. And now that Norway’s three intelligence agencies have told the public about the severity of the situation, Norwegians are certain to be more circumspect.
So should the rest of us.