“People in Norway can be a little bit trusting and naive,” said a German friend. He lives in the town of Sortland, in the sparsely populated Arctic county of Vesterålen. “They find it hard to imagine that people think they have something worth spying on.”
But people in Arctic Norway, who have grown accustomed to covert Russian activity in recent years, are now concerned that they have a new problem – the Chinese.
There are dormant and active Nato bases in Norway’s far north, as well as Andøya Space, the launch station for sophisticated Norwegian and European satellites. It sits on the remote island of Andøya, home to about 4,500 people.
May 7 saw the high-profile arrests of three Chinese citizens. A woman who rented a house near the space centre was taken to Oslo and put into pre-trial detention on suspicion of espionage.
Two other Chinese nationals were arrested in connection with the case, which centres on the discovery of a satellite receiver in a container in the port of Oslo, designed to gather data from polar-orbiting satellites. It weighed a cool 22 tonnes and the authorities believe it was destined for the house on Andøya.
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Norway’s security service said that a Norwegian-registered company was operating as a front for the Chinese state. It had made an “attempt to establish a receiver for satellite downloads from satellites in polar orbits suited for collecting data that could harm fundamental Norwegian interests”.
Just a few days later, another Chinese national was arrested near Bodø airport, reportedly after local people spotted smoke coming from a derelict war-time Nazi bunker. Clothes, food and equipment were found inside. The airport operates as a civilian facility but is also the command and control centre for Nato’s Combined Air Operations Centre Bodø, or CAOC.
It’s all the more surprising because the old adversary always used to be Moscow. Reports of Russian interests buying properties near military installations go back at least 10 years – to the obvious frustration of both some politicians and citizens.
The Russian border with Norway, at Kirkenes, is now closed, but astonishingly, in an exercise involving 20,000 Nato troops in 2024, many were billeted in Russian-owned mountain cabins in Målselv, overlooking the Bardufoss military base.
In another strange episode, Norway sold its Olavsvern naval base, near Tromsø, to a Norwegian businessman in 2012, but since then it has been used by Russian research vessels. In 2017, a Russian Orthodox congregation established a church with a view of the Haakonsvern naval base, in Bergen.
Three years later, the Vardø municipality, near Kirkenes, called off plans to make a municipal plot available for another Russian Orthodox church. That site was close to the Globus II radar station. In 2021, the Norwegian government vetoed the sale of the Bergen Engines plant, north of the city, after it became known that the Russian buyer belonged to Vladimir Putin’s inner circle.
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Norway is not alone in playing host to such Trojan Horse purchases. Recently the UK government blocked the sale of a golf course at Grange-over-Sands, in south Cumbria, to the daughter of a Russian oligarch. They did so on the grounds that it was uncomfortably close to the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant and even closer to the nuclear submarine manufacturing facility in Barrow-in-Furness.
Frustrated by Norway’s slow progress in dealing with these security threats, at least one Norwegian has taken matters into his own hands. At Skarsteindalen camp, built in 1990 as a safe space for military personnel at the now-defunct Andøya airbase, Terje Tinholt snapped up the military mountain hall for £50,000 in 2022.
“For me, it was important that it ended up in Norwegian hands, not Russian or Chinese,” he said.
