I began as an aspirant in UD in 1981 – idealistic, young and naïve. I was one of the youngest, and among the few who passed through the eye of the needle to the aspirant course on the first application that year. I was somewhat proud of that. The idealism and the pride were, however, soon to suffer a blow.

The first thing I was told by older colleagues was that it was essential to have one’s party membership in order (partiboka i orden), preferably active membership in NTL (LO), and preferably to apply early for a position in the Administration Department (Administrasjonsavdelingen) if one wished to advance quickly in UD’s strictly hierarchical system.

I was idealistic and ambitious, but I had neither party membership nor NTL membership in order. And I was not interested in working with administration and personnel policy. I wanted to go out into the world to safeguard and promote Norway’s interests.

So I clung to the notion that what mattered was to demonstrate integrity, work hard and do one’s best for people and country.

I soon discovered, however, that it was not quite so. It was more important to be “adaptable” and to maintain relations with the Administration Department and the Ministry’s leadership.

In the personnel section they called it “capacity for adaptation” (tilpasningsevne). In reality it was a personnel policy in which professional integrity largely had to yield to professional opportunism. At times it could verge on sheer professional servility.

The adaptable, and not necessarily the sharpest knives in the drawer, were rewarded. They received the first promotions and the most attractive postings.

The person who progressed furthest in my cohort was of that type. He had applied for admission two or three times before passing the entrance examinations and being accepted by the Aspirant Board (Aspirantnemnda). He did not distinguish himself in any way during the aspirant course, rather the opposite, but he had his party membership in order.

That professional integrity was not necessarily appreciated, I was soon to experience after having been posted scarcely a year in London.

A Soviet cruise missile had gone astray during a naval exercise in the Barents Sea and flown over Norwegian territory in Finnmark, finally landing in Lake Inari (Enaresjøen) in Finland, in the middle of the Christmas holiday, on 28 December 1984.

The world press was boiling and writing in war headlines, as if a third world war were imminent. The pressure for information on the embassy was enormous. But both UD and FD had taken Christmas leave.

There was no one at the other end. The embassy was less well informed than the press. It was incredibly embarrassing. We could hardly say that we had nothing to communicate, because everyone in UD and FD in Norway had taken Christmas leave!?

That there was no contingency preparedness was serious enough in itself. But that is not really the point here. I wrote a memorandum with an evaluation of what had occurred, and with proposals for measures that could help prevent the embassy from being placed in a similar situation again.

I was, however, strongly advised by my superiors at the embassy not to send the memorandum home to UD if I envisaged a future in the foreign service. That is the point.

They were not only concerned for my future, but also for their own. They were more concerned about what might happen if one spoke up than they were interested in contributing constructive criticism in order to improve something that manifestly did not function. And I was cowardly enough to follow that advice.

Yet scarcely had I arrived at the embassy in Tehran three years later before I was exposed to something similar.

A serious bilateral crisis with the Iranians arose on 10 October 1987, after Iranian opposition figures had occupied and vandalised the Iranian embassy on Drammensveien and beaten several of the diplomats, including the head of mission.

We feared retaliation and a reprise in Tehran of what had happened three weeks earlier, when a large mob had thrown the diplomats out of the windows from the fourth floor of the Kuwaiti and the Saudi Arabian embassies.

It was a crisis that was to endure for several months. It was a turbulent period during the war between Iraq and Iran, with continual air and missile attacks on Tehran and attacks on Norwegian and allied tankers in the Gulf.

The coordination between the various departments in UD was, however, entirely absent. Instructions were lacking and were partly contradictory. There were many cooks, much spillage and no crisis management in UD that assumed responsibility.

Not only was the chancery threatened. The security of the embassy’s employees and dependants was unnecessarily exposed. The embassy was more or less left to itself. It became difficult to maintain a normal working situation and a sensible dialogue with the Iranian authorities.

It came to a head and ended with the evacuation of the embassy’s employees and dependants, and this time with a twelve-page memorandum to the Ministry describing the course of events, the lack of coordination, the failure in communication and crisis management, and with proposals for measures to prevent something similar from occurring again.

I understood through informal channels fairly soon that it was no stroke of career genius.

The third time I received a lesson that the Ministry’s political and highest administrative leadership did not tolerate uncomfortable feedback was during the EEA negotiations.

The leadership in the Ministry was determined at any cost to have the agreement in place. I was responsible at expert level for negotiation areas such as state aid, public procurement, energy, technical barriers to trade and institutional solutions, among others.

We prepared proposals for Norwegian positions and wrote continuous memoranda to the political leadership in the Ministry and to the Office of the Prime Minister (Statsministerens kontor) on how the negotiations with the other EFTA countries and with the EU were developing.

If we submitted critical remarks linked to the EU’s negotiating demands, proposed alternative solutions or raised objections concerning the safeguarding of Norwegian interests, we fairly soon received feedback and endorsements from the leadership that made it clear that such remarks were not appreciated. They did not want objections. They wanted, at any cost, to put an agreement in place.

It was rather frustrating and a contributing reason why I left the foreign service, ten years older, less idealistic, but somewhat wiser than when I began.

It is a history I look back on with a certain melancholy. For everything could have been so much better in a fantastic workplace with the whole world as its field of work and with many exceedingly capable and hardworking colleagues.

They adapt and do as well as they can in a system that makes it unnecessarily difficult to deliver one’s best, let alone safeguard the country’s interests optimally.

The distinction between politics and administration is a fundamental principle in Norwegian public administration. This distinction is not merely organisational. It forms part of the very basis of legitimacy for Norwegian parliamentarism.

When party membership becomes dominant and the roles between political leadership and the civil service (embetsverk) slide into one another, professional integrity erodes, and the lines of responsibility become blurred.

This culture of impropriety is particularly strong in UD. In such systems a culture is quickly established in which regulations, meritocratic principles and professional assessments become difficult to uphold.

Loyalty to the leadership’s political and personal interests weighs more heavily than professional integrity and the organisation’s overarching objective of safeguarding Norwegian interests.

Charlotte Engelsen has conducted a study of the organisational culture in UD and written a good article about this in Aftenposten 16.2.

It is worth reading for those who wish to understand the background to what has now been uncovered in Norwegian UD in the wake of the Epstein case. It concerns the intermingling between political leadership and the civil service and the culture of impropriety it brought with it.

It has only now come to the surface, but this is how it has been for a long time. It is something current and former colleagues in UD can confirm. And it is something that not least UD’s leadership’s handling of the Epstein/Rød-Larsen/Juul case bears witness to.

“When the civil service and the political leadership slide into one another’s roles, the balance that is to ensure professionalism, neutrality and political capacity for implementation at the same time is weakened,” writes Engelsen.

She could have added that UD’s capacity for improvement and for safeguarding Norwegian interests is also weakened. And she could have added that this is neither right nor fair towards the many who have worked hard to become professional diplomats and who do as well as they can in this system.

In a political system such as the Norwegian one, it is presupposed that the relationship between political leadership and the civil service is finely balanced. The civil service shall ensure quality, accountability, consistency and long-term perspective, while the politicians set objectives and direction and make the necessary priorities.

When the civil service and the rest of the bureaucracy do not experience that objections or critical assessments and proposals for improvement are desired, or even safe, the foundation on which this system rests disappears.

Engelsen therefore quite rightly points out that the Epstein case is a symptom, not a cause.

It does not concern only individual persons’ lack of judgement and abuse of trust. Here there is talk of fundamental systemic failure, which has probably contributed to serious breaches of law. That must have consequences.

It must have consequences for those concerned. And it must have consequences for those who administer this system and are responsible for this culture of impropriety.

UD’s organisation and organisational culture must therefore be subjected to a fundamental review.

It is not merely important, but decisive in order to eradicate the abuse, and for the foreign service to be able to function as intended and safeguard Norwegian interests and Norway’s reputation effectively.