The KGB's Man in Copenhagen

Copenhagen

Vjateslav Katerinkin, an employee at the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen, was a true professional. In 1982 it became clear to Danish intelligence--the PET--that he was conducting secret meetings at regular intervals with somebody outside the capital, but on each occasion the Soviet operative managed to shake off his Danish followers. However, from Katerinkin's secretive behavior, the PET people surmised that whoever the Russian was contacting must be an agent. Katerinkin's unlucky day came on March 7, 1983, when he was unable to shake his tail and was followed to the train station at Farum, a suburb of Copenhagen. As it turned out, his contact was Jørgen Dragsdahl, a well-known journalist with the left-leaning Copenhagen daily Information who specialized in security policy.

Not that Dragsdahl's contact with the KGB came as any great surprise to Danish intelligence. For years the PET had been keeping an eye on this highly committed critic of Western and especially American security policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. In 1979, according to Danish military intelligence, Dragsdahl had based a series of newspaper articles on forged documents intended to throw suspicion on the United States.

From information handed over by the KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who had been recruited by British intelligence in 1974 while serving in the KGB's Copenhagen residentura, much was known about Dragsdahl's activities. Additional intelligence came from the PET's own surveillance. It was known, for instance, that in 1981-82--at a time when Dragsdahl was his paper's correspondent in the United States--he had been meeting in Vienna with Vladimir Minin from the Soviet embassy in Copenhagen.

In 1985 and again in 1986, the PET chose to confront Jørgen Dragsdahl with the information it had on him. Most of it was accurate, he had to admit. However, he claimed that there was nothing sinister about his admittedly suspicious behavior. He denied ever having received money from the Soviets. His contacts with KGB officers were due to the fact that in 1982 he had married a Russian girl and was now desperately trying to get her out of the country, which eventually he succeeded in doing by threatening the KGB with exposing its attempts to recruit Dragsdahl and some other Danes he knew. (Dragsdahl may be the only person in the world to have successfully blackmailed this redoubtable organization.)

Despite Dragsdahl's protestations, a declassified PET report dated April 3, 1986, concluded that from a KGB perspective Dragsdahl must have been "uncommonly useful." The report further noted: "It is not without foundation that at some point THE CENTER [KGB headquarters in Moscow] had labeled him 'No. 1' in Denmark, although one can only guess how much real benefit it has derived from this agent."

When the Danish daily Jyllands-Posten--famous for its publication in 2005 of the 12 Muhammad cartoons--repeated the PET's assessment of Dragsdahl in a lengthy article published on January 14, 2007, all hell broke loose. The author was Denmark's preeminent specialist on Soviet and Cold War history, Professor Bent Jensen from Odense University. He is the author of a number of highly acclaimed (and among many of his colleagues and members of the leftist intelligentsia much-hated) studies on Soviet history and Soviet-Danish relations. A few days prior to his bombshell in Jyllands-Posten, Jensen had been chosen--not by the government but by an independent board of directors--to head a new state-financed Center for Cold War Studies set up by an act of parliament in response to criticism from the center-right that research carried out by the semiofficial Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS) was likely to skirt the hard questions of who did what to undermine Western resolve against Soviet designs during the Cold War.

As his previous work shows, there could be no doubt that if there were skeletons in the closet, Professor Jensen would have both the skill and the determination to drag them into the daylight. And within Denmark's governing coalition there was little doubt that many a murky secret remained to be unearthed.