This collusion allows party and personal interests to take precedence over impartiality and professional integrity, and sometimes even over national interests.

Almost everyone in key positions in the top civil service at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is more or less “corrupted” by the party book and this network, from the foreign minister to most of the heads of department in the various divisions.

This also applies to the management of the administration department, which is responsible for personnel policy and manages the organisation’s selection and sanction mechanisms on behalf of the political leadership.

Together with the political leadership, they decide who gets promoted, who gets the attractive stations and who is not considered sufficiently “adaptable”.

The latter are often sent to a consulate-general in “faraway Borstan”, an uninteresting position in the consulate department or “put in the dry attic” on the fourth floor to read newspapers.

This is how the central political network keeps control of ordinary career diplomats. They adapt as best they can, for fear of being sidelined.

Huitfeldt with US Secretary of State Blinken, 2021. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The appointment of Anniken Huitfeldt as ambassador to Washington is an example of this collusion and of a meritocracy that is disregarded at will.

Huitfeldt had “lost confidence” as a government minister because of her spouse’s insider trading in shares, but obviously had enough confidence to be appointed ambassador to Norway’s most important embassy. Does that make sense?

Another example is Torgeir Larsen, the current foreign minister, who is the highest-ranking civil servant and chief administrative officer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Larsen has a political background from more than 30 years in the Labour Party and has served as State Secretary to Jonas Gahr Støre and Chief of Staff to Jens Stoltenberg in NATO, a typical apparatchik.

In 2019, when Ine Eriksen Søreide (H) was Minister of Foreign Affairs, Larsen resigned from Ap and joined the Conservatives. The fact that his party book changed colour from red to blue apparently didn’t matter, because in 2023, when Anniken Huitfeldt (Ap) was Minister of Foreign Affairs, she appointed him Foreign Minister.

The network and collusion between politicians from the two state-supporting parties, and between them and the civil service, cuts across party lines.

Søreide and Huitfeldt are best friends with Mona Juul and Jens Stoltenberg’s wife, Ingrid Schulerud, who is an ambassador. Larsen has one foot in each of the two state parties and is part of the same network.

By the way, it was the same Torgeir Larsen who was head of Jonas Gahr Støre’s secretariat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2008, and who at the time refused to cut funding from the Ministry to Rød-Larsen’s IPI, despite the fact that Morten Wetland, who was UN ambassador at the time, had criticised the strikingly high transfers to IPI from Rød-Larsen’s old friends at the Ministry.

It’s the same Torgeir Larsen who was head of Jonas Gahr Støre’s secretariat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2008.

This is the same Torgeir Larsen who is now Foreign Minister and who is handling the case against Mona Juul, and who, together with Espen Barth Eide, has tried to limit it to an ordinary personnel matter.

Now they are trying to divert attention away from their own responsibility by the fact that Mona Juul has finally been sacked and stripped of her security clearance.

The next move is to close the case and announce that, as a result of Mona Juul’s resignation, there are no longer grounds for proceeding with the case.

Norwegian diplomat Geir O. Pedersen to be new UN Special Envoy for Syria. Photo: Norway in Geneva

Geir O. Pedersen, another Labour Party man and close friend of Rød-Larsen, is another example. He was head of the UN department at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from 2009 to 2012.

He was also informed of the conspicuously large transfers to IPI, but nevertheless passed on more than 36 of the total 130 million that went to IPI until 2019, when Rød-Larsen was finally fired from IPI after DN revealed his close ties to Epstein.

Talk about collusion! The goat and the oat sack! You can’t make this shit up!

The fact that Rød-Larsen has been able to carry on undisturbed for all these years is completely incomprehensible. That he has not yet been investigated, and that his “private” archive from the Oslo trial and important evidence has not long since been confiscated, is even more incomprehensible.

Jonas Gahr Støre, who was Minister of Foreign Affairs, intervened in 2006 and stopped the National Archivist, who tried several times to obtain Rød-Larsen’s documents from the Oslo trial.

What is it that Støre and Co. are afraid of finding?

It is only now, after the publication of the Epstein files no longer makes it possible for the political class to overlook the matter, that it is coming up.</p

Because there have been many reports of gross irregularities linked to Rød-Larsen, dating back to the Bird/Fideco scandal before the Oslo process began in 1993.

It is only now emerging that Morten Wetland, who was ambassador to the UN delegation, had already warned the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 2008 about the large sums involved in IPI and that it was irresponsible to “throw money at an old friend”. The warning was, as mentioned, ignored.

Wetland has now, after his own retirement, stated that he believes Rød-Larsen should have been imprisoned for financial irregularities. It looks like he’s absolutely right.

But it says something both about Terje Rød-Larsen and about an unfavourable culture in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where professional integrity has to give way when it goes against the interests of the network.

It’s typical that there were no consequences in 2008. And it’s typical that it only comes to light 18 years later after the case has been unravelled by external forces.

One of the most sensational reports, which has only now come to light, comes from a former IPI employee, who in 2019 reported that several young, obviously unqualified women from Eastern Europe were given short-term jobs in the organisation. Photos of these women in front of the UN building were shared with Epstein. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs was notified, but no further investigations were carried out.

When Ine Eriksen Søreide, who was Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, was recently confronted with this, she apologised that she had declared herself disqualified because of her close friendship with Mona Juul, and that this was the reason why she did not take any further action in the case.

In other words, disqualification was used as a reason not to do anything? Can anyone understand that? The argumentation is completely absurd. It reveals a culture where reports of serious offences are ignored in order to protect their own network.

Here is Ine Eriksen Søreide together with her Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov, back when she was Foreign Minister.

Ine Eriksen thus reveals that she is not familiar with either the security instructions or the Security Act.

However, she should have realised then, if not before, that there was a risk that Ambassador Mona Juul, as Terje Rød-Larsen’s spouse and close associate, had also been compromised along with him in accordance with Section 8 of the Security Act.

Mona Juul should then have lost her security clearance and been called home. Instead, she could continue as UN ambassador until 2023.

Only yesterday she lost her security clearance and was fired. The same should have happened to Ine Eriksen Søreide in 2019, if not sooner.

It is difficult to characterise this as anything other than a gross breach of authority or misconduct on the part of a foreign minister who has chosen to ignore the security regulations, which she is now trying to talk her way out of.

If the Conservatives realise what’s best for themselves, they will refrain from electing her as the new party leader. It’s also hard to see how she can continue as chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

After DN’s revelations in 2019, I wrote a lengthy article in Klassekampen in 2020 in which I criticised the privatisation of Norwegian foreign policy in the Oslo process and that Mona Juul was probably in breach of the Security Act as a result of her spouse’s close relationship with convicted criminal Jeffrey Epstein.

Again, without any consequences. I have written another seven articles about the same. They have been silenced. Only now, after the publication of the Epstein files, has the Ministry of Foreign Affairs finally taken away her security clearance after massive pressure.

In 2021, the Office of the Auditor General published a report based on a very limited review of IPI’s transactions in the period 2007-2012.

Despite the report’s limited focus, it also concluded that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had violated the rules of procedure and impartiality, lacked documentation, ignored the high salary payments to Rød-Larsen and was guilty of “highly reprehensible” behaviour.

There were also no consequences.

Mona Juul, on whom the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ine Eriksen Søreide had spent NOK 34 million in 2019 in a campaign to get Norway’s representative (observer status) on the UN Security Council, remained on the Security Council until 2023 with the highest security clearance.

She then served as ambassador to Jordan from 2024 until she finally lost her security clearance and was fired from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Monday. It is only today that Rød-Larsen has been made the subject of an investigation.

The tardiness of the MFA management is, to say the least, remarkable.

The Epstein/Rød-Larsen case is obviously serious. But the real issue is the network behind it that allowed it to take place.

We are talking about a political class that has established an oligarchic network across party lines, and across the important divide in the Norwegian political system between political leadership and the civil service.

This has contributed to creating an organisational culture in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that sanctions employees with professional and personal integrity, and who speak up when professional or national interests conflict with the personal interests of the political leadership. It is a dysfunctional system that favours and rewards the servile and “adaptable”, who do not.

When such systems manage high levels of trust, such as safeguarding national interests in relation to other countries’ governments, a huge purse (60 billion) of other people’s money and at the same time are without effective control and monitoring mechanisms, the stage is set for favours, breaches of authority and, in the worst case, corruption and security breaches.

Totalitarian organisations with a highly centralised and hierarchical organisational structure, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Armed Forces and the police, are particularly vulnerable to being governed by this type of culture.

There are few or no whistleblowers in such systems. The very few who speak up get a slap on the wrist or are sidelined. And those who do speak up only do so when they enter retirement and are out of reach.

This is the main reason why Terje Rød Larsen was allowed to continue unhindered for so long. There is a broad systemic failure as a result of the political class utilising its governance mandate to put its own private interests ahead of those of the community.

As a consequence, the trust and reputation of both the Foreign Service and the Nobel Committee have been dragged into the mud. The weakened reputation of the Royal Family has been brought about by the Royal Family itself.

But if we are ever to clean up this mess and get the foreign service to function as intended, a thorough and independent investigation must be carried out to uncover all the facts in the case. The onion must be peeled to the core.

Espen Barth Eide (Photo: US Department of State), Jonas Gahr Støre (Photo: Norsk olje og gass / Wikimedia Commons (cc by-sa 2.0), Jens Stoltenberg (Photo: The White House), Erna Solberg (Photo: European Peoples’ Party (EPP) / Wikimedia Commons (cc by 2.0), Ine Eriksen Søreide (Photo: Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs / Wikimedia Commons (cc by-sa 2.0) og Børge Brende (Photo: US Department of State).

 

 

The investigation cannot be limited to Terje Rød-Larsen, Mona Juul, Thorbjørn Jagland and Børge Brende.

It must also include the network behind leading politicians and people in leading positions, those who saw themselves served by it, and who with open eyes allowed it to continue year after year without taking any action.

I’m not just thinking of Ine Eriksen Søreide, Anniken Huitfeldt, Espen Barth Eide, Torgeir Larsen, Geir O. Pedersen and others. I’m also thinking of Jens Stoltenberg, Jonas Gahr Støre and Erna Solberg.

A thorough and independent investigation, which also includes these, is a popular demand from those of us who are taxpayers and voters!