The KGB's Man in Copenhagen

...Nevertheless, to this day it maintains that Jensen had no right to quote its own evaluation of Dragsdahl from a declassified document, and issued a warning: If the professor were to persist in exposing persons and facts it did not want exposed, the PET would come down hard on him...

...Once out of office in September 1982, however, the Social Democrats quickly changed their tune, and for the rest of the decade they increasingly came under the spell of Moscow's "peace offensives" aimed at undermining the Western alliance...

...To a large extent the guiding light behind this radical breach with three decades of Danish security policy was none other than J0rgen Dragsdahl...

...Disinformation, mendacious propaganda and ideological undermining of the West . . . [became] the decisive front in the struggle for communism's global victory...

...By the beginning of the 1980s, the mighty Social Democratic party, the very backbone of the Danish welfare state and up till then a staunch supporter of NATO and the transatlantic alliance, was in full retreat from its previous policies...

...It "was far more incendiary being fired in Information than [it would have been] in Land og Folk [the Communist paper...

...1" in Denmark would have led to condemnation of Dragsdahl...

...Most of it was accurate, he had to admit...

...in Vienna with Vladimir Minin from the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen...

...Why is it so important to demonize the good professor to the extent that he is deprived of his last shred of credibility...

...Katerinkin's unlucky day came on March 7, 1983, when he was unable to shake his tail and was followed to the train station at Farum, a suburb of Copenhagen...

...The governing parties, who demanded that no stone be left unturned in the effort to expose the truth about Denmark's Cold War experience, have been largely silent—except on a couple of occasions when they have sided with the opposition's attacks on Jensen...

...An even better question is: Who are "they"—and why are they still so powerful 16 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union...

...Given this background one would have assumed that Jensen's expose of the KGB's "No...

...NATO's strategic decision was now denounced as a dangerous provocation against the largely benevolent rulers of the Kremlin...

...As a propagandist and provider of arguments, [Dragsdahl] acquired a status and influence that no Communist could have obtained...

...This did not mollify the service, however...

...Other MPs from the opposition have portrayed the director of the new Cold War Center as a common criminal with a suspended sentence over his head and demanded that he be fired...

...The author was Denmark's preeminent specialist on Soviet and Cold War history, Professor Bent Jensen from Odense University...

...Interestingly, the PET has been unable to provide historians with clear-cut guidelines for what is permissible when it comes to quoting personal information...

...This despite the fact that the professor had sent his article to PET four months before it was published and asked if the intelligence service thought he had violated his terms of access...

...According to an authoritative opinion by a law professor and expert on data protection at Copenhagen University, referred to by the PET itself and provided to historians seeking access to its archives, "there are no judicial rules that clearly and unequivocally indicate what personal data may be published...

...We were amazed to be handed so much pro-Soviet and anti-American ammunition," wrote Kofoed...

...Several well-known historians, who had not seen the documents Bent Jensen had had access to, denounced him for blackening the reputation of J0rgen Dragsdahl, who quickly established himself as a victim of Bent Jensen's evil machinations...

...There can be no doubt that J0rgen Dragsdahl is politically well protected...

...Additional intelligence came from the PET's own surveillance...

...To the delight of the already anti-American and anti-NATO Communists, left socialists, and centrist Social Liberals, leading Social Democrats adopted a vicious anti-American rhetoric...

...His contacts with KGB officers were due to the fact that in 1982 he had married a Russian girl and was now desperately trying to get her out of the country, which eventually he succeeded in doing by threatening the KGB with exposing its attempts to recruit Dragsdahl and some other Danes he knew...

...His colleague from the other governing party, the Conservatives, was equally emphatic: "There is a need to expose those forces who . . . committed intellectual and moral treason...

...Good questions...

...The Kremlin obviously considered Denmark a soft spot in the Western alliance, ready to be pried loose from NATO and turned toward neutralist positions and subservience to Soviet security interests...

...The spokesman for the Liberals (half of the center-right governing coalition) stressed that Danes had a right to know who had been on the side of the enemy during the Cold War years, and he pointed to the "sad fact that there were Danes who committed treason of some magnitude through their cooperation with the Soviet Union and the countries of the Warsaw Pact...

...The party's hard core had nothing but contempt for the "peace blubberers," the useful idiots who spent their time marching in favor of slogans like "The Baltic—sea of peace" or "The North as a nuclear-free zone...

...On the contrary, it let it be known that Bent Jensen's case might be handed over to the police for criminal prosecution...

...However, he claimed that there was nothing sinister about his admittedly suspicious behavior...

...Not that Dragsdahl's contact with the KGB came as any great surprise to Danish intelligence...

...Not to be outdone, the Social Democratic spokesman on security policy, Lasse Budtz, told Soviet media that the American president was "mentally disturbed...

...And within Denmark's governing coalition there was little doubt that many a murky secret remained to be unearthed...

...He is the author of a number of highly acclaimed (and among many of his colleagues and members of the leftist intelligentsia much-hated) studies on Soviet history and Soviet-Danish relations...

...The question is why...

...However, from Katerinkin's secretive behavior, the PET people surmised that whoever the Russian was contacting must be an agent...

...On the contrary, Faurby has condemned Jensen's January 14 article quoting the PET's opinion of J0rgen Dragsdahl as an unscientific attempt to turn historical research into a court of inquisition...

...Nobody accuses Dragsdahl of having been a spy...

...Party chairman Anker J0rgensen characterized President Ronald Reagan as a "mad dog" while his crown prince as party leader, Svend Auken, labeled him "a trigger-happy cowboy...

...The Soviets had reason to be optimistic...

...Even on the political side, the old No...

...By Lars Hedegaard Copenhagen Vjateslav Katerinkin, an employee at the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen, was a true professional...

...Despite two reminders, he got no answer until a couple of days before the article was to go to print...

...As Danish intelligence saw it, the KGB considered him a far more useful asset as an agent of influence—someone who was well placed to disseminate Soviet propaganda and influence public as well as elite opinion...

...The Social Democratic chairman of the Parliamentarian Intelligence Surveillance Committee, Morten B0dskov, has demanded that Jensen be denied further access to the archives...

...Dragsdahl's political importance is also underlined in a remarkable piece written by former Communist hardliner Jannich Kofoed and published in the Copenhagen daily Politiken on February 17, 2007...

...When the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten—famous for its publication in 2005 of the 12 Muhammad cartoons— repeated the PET's assessment of Dragsdahl in a lengthy article published on January 14, 2007, all hell broke loose...

...A few days after the publication of Jensen's article in Jyllands-Posten, the PET announced that it would investigate whether Jensen had violated the confidentiality rules governing his access to the archives...

...The report further noted: "It is not without foundation that at some point THE CENTER [KGB headquarters in Moscow] had labeled him 'No...

...He was no useful idiot, only useful...

...The law professor's opinion also makes clear that people who are not well known may demand greater protection of their private lives than public figures...

...The leading opposition daily Politiken went so far as to accuse Jensen of harming state security merely by quoting the KGB's and PET's own characterization of Dragsdahl...

...For that reason agents of influence assumed an important role in the continued conflict...

...It was known, for instance, that in 1981-82—at a time when Dragsdahl was his paper's correspondent in the United States—he had been meeting Lars Hedegaard is a commentator with the Copenhagen daily Berlingske Tidende and editor of the webzine Sappho.dk...

...From an overall Western perspective, the Danish Cold War experience would seem a particularly instructive case to study...

...Thus encouraged, J0rgen Dragsdahl has brought libel suits against Bent Jensen and Jyllands-Posten...

...As his previous work shows, there could be no doubt that if there were skeletons in the closet, Professor Jensen would have both the skill and the determination to drag them into the daylight...

...In 1979, according to Danish military intelligence, Dragsdahl had based a series of newspaper articles on forged documents intended to throw suspicion on the United States...

...In the inner sanctums of Denmark's Communist party, the comrades were well aware that there were good missiles (the Soviet arsenal) and bad ones, and that the whole point of the "peace" offensive that took off around 1980 was to strengthen the Soviet Union and weaken the "imperialist camp...

...Despite Dragsdahl's protestations, a declassified PET report dated April 3, 1986, concluded that from a KGB perspective Dragsdahl must have been "uncommonly useful...

...The PET has obliged by opening its archives to Dragsdahl so that he may know all that Jensen has been able to learn...

...As it turned out, his contact was J0rgen Dragsdahl, a well-known journalist with the left-leaning Copenhagen daily Information who specialized in security policy...

...In the event, the PET had to admit there wasn't much to pin its case on...

...Dragsdahl may be the only person in the world to have successfully blackmailed this redoubtable organization...

...For years the PET had been keeping an eye on this highly committed critic of Western and especially American security policy vis-a-vis the Soviet Union...

...Lest one should conclude that the highly visible journalist and political operator J0rgen Dragsdahl—who remains to this day a frequent commentator on national radio—would fit the bill, the PET has hastened to add that it considers him to belong to the category of not well-known...

...As late as November 1979, the Social Democratic prime minister, Anker J0rgensen, had supported NATO's decision to deploy 572 intermediate-range missiles in Europe unless the Soviets scrapped their plans to deploy SS-20 missiles against Western Europe...

...1' in Denmark, although one can only guess how much real benefit it has derived from this agent...

...When parliament decided to grant historians and others widely increased access to the archives of the intelligence services in January 2003, the intentions of the legislative majority could not have been clearer...

...However, there appears to be a difference, as Jensen may not be permitted to use PET documents in court in mounting his defense—a restriction that does not seem to apply to Dragsdahl...

...As Jensen hinted in a February 4 interview with the daily Politiken, it is hard to explain the PET's almost panicked reaction unless one assumes that powerful political forces have been active behind the scenes...

...In short, what do they have to hide...

...J0rgen Dragsdahl, however, was a different matter...

...The PET asked him to remove a number of observations from the manuscript, and Jensen obliged...

...In 1982 it became clear to Danish intelligence—the PET—that he was conducting secret meetings at regular intervals with somebody outside the capital, but on each occasion the Soviet operative managed to shake off his Danish followers...

...This assessment is supported by the director of the Danish Defense Academy's Center for Military History, Ib Faurby, who is by no means a friend of Bent Jensen...

...Not only was he an exceptionally well-informed journalist with unique access to Soviet sources, he was even appointed a member of the official Commission on Security and Disarmament (SNU...

...Instead, it was Jensen who was roundly condemned by large parts of the press for having leveled unfounded accusations against such a man as Dragsdahl...

...In 1985 and again in 1986, the PET chose to confront J0rgen Dragsdahl with the information it had on him...

...As former KGB general Oleg Kalugin explained to Jyllands-Posten's then-correspondent Flemming Rose some years ago: During the latter phase of the Cold War in the 1970s and '80s, Soviet intelligence was well aware that it could not defeat the West by means of war...

...As Jyllands-Posten asked in a June 1 article: "What are they so afraid of...

...1 has scored valuable points, as a number of parliamentarians who worked with Dragsdahl in the 1980s have turned on Jensen in defense of their old comrade in arms...

...A few days prior to his bombshell in Jyllands-Posten, Jensen had been chosen—not by the government but by an independent board of directors—to head a new state-financed Center for Cold War Studies set up by an act of parliament in response to criticism from the center-right that research carried out by the semiofficial Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) was likely to skirt the hard questions of who did what to undermine Western resolve against Soviet designs during the Cold War...

...He denied ever having received money from the Soviets...

...From information handed over by the KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who had been recruited by British intelligence in 1974 while serving in the KGB's Copenhagen residentura, much was known about Dragsdahl's activities...

...But the opposite happened...

...The Conservative-led government that assumed office in September 1982 did not command a parliamentary majority, and in no time at all the Social Democrats placed themselves at the head of a new security policy majority that forced the government to accept one anti-NATO and especially anti-American "footnote" after another—to the extent that Denmark's very membership in the Western alliance came into question...