Migrants from Russia sent on spy assignments – Norwegian intelligence

Some of the migrants who travelled from Russia to Norway through the Storskog border crossing in 2015 had received assignments from foreign secret services. Source: Norwegian government-owned broadcasting company NRK, citing Atle Tangen, Head of Counterintelligence at the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) Quote: "We discovered that foreign services were sending people on [spy] missions," Tangen said during his podcast.

Tangen confirmed to NRK that the PST had not published this information before.

He did not say what had happened to the spies who were unmasked. "These people were taken care of and dealt with in various ways. I don't want to say anything regarding their nationality," he stated.

Tangen said he would not describe the people who were exposed as "spies", because they were not intelligence agents in the usual sense of the word, but people who had been forced to carry out assignments by intelligence organisations through deception or threats. "Illegal intelligence against refugees is still ongoing, as is the recruitment of refugees heading to Norway to force them to conduct unlawful intelligence. For this reason, we cannot give more detail right now," Tangen added.

Hundreds of asylum-seekers from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries cycled to the Norwegian border from the Russian side every week in 2015.

Background: 

• Earlier, employees of the Latvian State Security Service detained a Russian citizen suspected of spying for the Russian secret services.
• Prior to that, a court in the Polish city of Lublin found 14 citizens of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine guilty of preparing sabotage operations in favour of Moscow as a part of a spy network.
• The 16 defendants were accused of espionage in November, specifically of preparing to blow up trains carrying humanitarian aid for Ukraine and spying on military facilities and critical infrastructure facilities.
• Those convicted are known to include Maxim S., a Russian ice hockey player who played for a Polish team in Sosnowiec and was arrested in June, and, according to Polish media, "two Ukrainian lawyers, a political scientist, a teacher of French, a pharmacist, and a software engineer".

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