From Russia with Lovers

One evening late last month Gunvor Galtung Haavik, a 64-year-old clerk in Norway's Foreign Ministry, went for a stroll along a snowy path in suburban Oslo. As if by chance, she stopped to talk to a man. Suddenly the night air was filled with shouts. As some Norwegian counterespionage agents charged from behind trees and snowbanks, others jumped from cruising taxicabs. They swiftly wrestled the man to the ground, grabbed a packet that he had given Haavik and hustled the woman off to jail. The trusted, spinsterly Miss Haavik, who routinely handled secret documents, had been a Soviet spy for more than 27 of her 30 years in the Foreign Ministry.

Within days of her arrest, the Oslo government expelled six Russians, including the Soviet embassy's third secretary, A.K. Printsipalov, the KGB operative who was caught passing documents to Haavik. Last week still another Russian departed on a one-way trip to Moscow. He was G.F. Titov, officially a counselor in the Soviet embassy in Oslo but in fact the KGB spy master for the entire Norwegian operation.

First Affair. The recruitment of Haavik as a Soviet agent evidently stemmed from her lifelong infatuation with everything Russian--especially men. Her first affair, in the 1930s, was innocent enough: it involved a refugee Soviet artist who left her with fluent Russian. Then, at the end of World War II, Haavik was recruited by Norwegian forces to work as a nurse and interpreter with Soviet prisoners who had been held by the Nazis in local P.O.W. camps. There she fell in love again.

Investigators in Oslo speculate that Haavik resolved to get to Russia to be reunited with her soldier lover after he was repatriated--a plan she fulfilled when posted to the Norwegian embassy in Moscow. But the soldier was threatened with imprisonment--in Stalinist times a common fate for ex-P.O.W.s whose loyalty was deemed questionable. The KGB offered to help, promising that he would be safe if she performed some favors at the embassy. Haavik never saw her lover again, but she became ensnared in the KGB system. By 1949, when Norway entered NATO, she was ready with a signed spy contract.

Ironically, Norway arrested and tried a woman for espionage in 1965, after a KGB defector had told how Soviet intelligence in the 1950s secured information from "a female employee [in the Moscow embassy] who enjoyed Russian male companionship." But the authorities picked up the wrong woman --one Ingeborg Lygren--and had to pay her $5,700 in false-arrest damages, while Gunvor Haavik continued her career.

Suspicions were aroused again just a few years ago, when Foreign Ministry officials began noting how uncannily well informed Soviet diplomats seemed to be on confidential Norwegian positions regarding European Community membership. Norwegian counterintelligence slapped a tight surveillance on Soviet diplomats in Oslo and eventually caught Printsipalov meeting with Haavik. After tracking the pair painstakingly for several months, they finally sprang their trap.

For her 27 years as an agent, Haavik collected a paltry $9,500. If convicted as a spy she could get 15 years in jail --a prisoner of love.

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