Lars Findsen was in police custody when he discovered that spies from Denmark’s domestic intelligence agency had tapped his phone and wired his house with bugs.
The spies, he learned, had spent months eavesdropping on his daily life at home, recording hundreds of hours of his conversations in his home, including with his three children.
It was the kind of intrusive surveillance operation normally reserved for a suspected terrorist or enemy foreign agent. Findsen was neither; he was Denmark’s top spy chief.
Findsen had spent decades working at the highest levels of the secret services. He was appointed head of the country’s foreign intelligence service in 2015. Previously, he had run its sister domestic agency which, he now understood, had been monitoring his every move.
In custody, Findsen was presented with reports from the operation. “That was the shocking thing,” he told the Guardian, “to sit and look at your life transformed into police reports written from surveillance tapes.”
This autumn, the 59-year-old spymaster is due to stand trial on charges that he disclosed state secrets to journalists and close relatives including his 84-year old mother, in a series of conversations that appear to have been recorded by the tiny listening devices that were hidden in his home.
The prosecution of such a senior intelligence official may seem extraordinary, but shortly after the proceedings get under way, a separate trial will open in which Findsen’s former boss at Denmark’s defence ministry will face similar charges.
The veteran government minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen is a towering figure in Danish politics who has held multiple senior cabinet positions. As defence minister until 2019, he oversaw the intelligence service run by Findsen.
The criminal cases have rocked Denmark, a scandal that’s turned spy against spy and thrust into the spotlight one of the country’s most closely guarded secrets – which both men now stand accused of betraying.
At stake, however, is more than the fate of two individuals. The drama has had a profoundly chilling effect on the Danish media and given rise to a slow-burning political crisis about the lengths to which an otherwise liberal European democracy is prepared to go to control its secrets.
Alarmed by the government’s handling of the affair and the criminal proceedings it is now pursuing, one of the country’s top legal professors recently asked: “What’s going on? Hello, we are in Denmark, a state governed by the rule of law. Not Belarus.”
In exclusive interviews with the Guardian, Findsen and Frederiksen have spoken for the first time with international media about how they became entangled in this often confounding series of events.
Neither the intelligence chief nor ex-minister are legally permitted to discuss the specific charges against them, and their respective trials are due to be held in highly unusual secret proceedings.
Prosecutors have charged them with offences amounting to treason under a section of the criminal code not used for more than 40 years. Under the draconian law, those found guilty can be imprisoned for up to 12 years.
Both men believe they’re innocent. Findsen has described the charges against him as “completely insane”, while Frederiksen believes his case is politically motivated, likening it to a bewildering “hoax”. “To understand what’s going on with me at the moment,” he says, “think of Kafka”.
Just one of the bizarre aspects of both cases is that the unmentionable state secrets the men are alleged to have leaked are now open secrets and widely known to relate to a long-standing intelligence partnership between Denmark and the US.
The secret deal – the “crown jewels” of Danish intelligence – was hidden from the public until details began to emerge in 2014, when documents leaked by Edward Snowden revealed how European countries such as Denmark help facilitate the US’s globe-spanning electronic surveillance.
The disclosures have cast a long shadow over the scandal that’s ensnared Findsen and Frederiksen. The scale of western intelligence agencies’ bulk surveillance programmes may have faded from most memories. In Denmark, repercussions of Snowden’s leaks are still playing out today.
Spy turns whistleblower
On the windswept southern tip of Amager, the island immediately south of Copenhagen, there is a cluster of drab grey buildings surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence and watchful surveillance cameras. Known as “the Farm”, the site is home to Denmark’s foreign intelligence service, and it’s where one of its young officers set the story in motion.
In June 2014, the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information published a piece based on Snowden’s leaks revealing a secret agreement between the intelligence service, known as DDIS, and the US National Security Agency to tap fibre-optic cables transporting internet traffic through Denmark.
US and Denmark's secret cable-tapping deal
In the 1990s, the US and Denmark struck a deal to secretly intercept telecoms and internet traffic passing through Danish fibre-optic cables after spies at the US National Security Agency (NSA) discovered the Scandinavian country was a critical hub for global communications traffic.
The highly classified deal, Danish newspaper Berlingske reported, was kept secret for more than two decades by a succession of government ministers, officials and spy chiefs. The agreement itself has remained locked in a safe at the headquarters of its foreign intelligence service in Copenhagen.
Since the 1990s, the volume of internet traffic passing through the cables vastly increased and the cable-tapping programme became a major strategic asset for Denmark. Thanks to the country’s geographic location, the arrangement appears to have yielded a rich source of intelligence from intercepts of Russian and Chinese communications.
Under the deal, both US and Danish intelligence agencies were forbidden from intercepting the communications of Danish citizens however this was called into question in 2020 when an independent oversight body said there were risks this had occurred.
The article provided the first glimpse of one of the nation’s most sensitive secrets and appears to have caught the attention of the intelligence officer who worked as a hacker in the agency’s cyber-division.
Former colleagues said he was viewed as a rising star, though he was also known to be suspicious of the agency’s relationship with the NSA and had concerns the US was illegally collecting Danish citizens’ data.
The intelligence officer, who was in his 30s, helped launch an internal investigation, codenamed Operation Dunhammer, into whether the NSA was abusing the cable-tapping deal. When its findings were shared with senior managers, his concerns were dismissed as unfounded and he was ordered to cease the investigation.
Rather than drop it, the spy took the extraordinary step of beginning to secretly record conversations with colleagues. Conversations about the NSA partnership with Denmark’s most senior spymasters, including Lars Findsen, appear to have been among those captured over a period of several years.
Today, Findsen is sharply critical of the officer and says there was “no basis” for his actions. He was, he says, “unhinged and had his own narrative”.
In late 2019, the officer’s concerns found their way to the independent oversight body that supervises Danish intelligence, which took possession of his secret recordings – as many as 100 hours of audio – as well as the internal Dunhammer report. Behind closed doors, the spy had turned whistleblower.
A ‘historic scandal’?
In August 2020, “all hell broke loose”, a former intelligence official recalls. The independent watchdog, led by a senior judge, revealed in a brief statement that it had obtained a large amount of material from a whistleblower and listed a series of incendiary allegations about how the DDIS spy service was operating.
Among its findings, the body warned there were “risks in the central part of DDIS’s intelligence gathering capabilities that unauthorised intelligence has been gathered on Danish citizens”. The statement was not explicit, but according to former officials this was a reference to data collected under the NSA cable-tapping programme.
The fallout was immediate. Findsen and several colleagues at the agency were placed on indefinite leave. “It was not a nice situation,” says Findsen.
The media branded the findings a “historic scandal” and suggested the spies were working outside the law, effectively acting as a “state within a state”. As one front page read: “Spy chiefs accused of illegal surveillance”.
Responding to the coverage, Frederiksen, who had left the defence ministry a year earlier, defended Findsen and the other officials. “This is what triggered my involvement in this case,” Frederiksen says. “I knew them as loyal employees, dedicated and honest people, who were unjustly labelled as having done something wrong.”
In September 2020, Frederiksen publicly criticised the decision to publish the watchdog’s findings and, crucially, while defending the DDIS employees he appeared to provide the first on-the-record confirmation of the existence of the cable-tapping deal with the US glimpsed in the Snowden leaks.
Frederiksen acknowledged the arrangement again in subsequent interviews and went further in another media appearance in December 2021. “I’m going to be careful what I can say, otherwise I’ll risk a prison sentence,” he said on live TV before remarking that Denmark “greatly benefits from being allied with the NSA”.
Shortly before the interview, a government-appointed panel of judges had rejected the independent watchdog’s findings, seemingly drawing a line under the controversy.
Behind the scenes, there had been a remarkable twist. People close to Findsen were suddenly unable to contact him. It was as though he’d disappeared.
What only a few in Denmark knew was that, days earlier, a group of armed officers had stopped the spy chief at Copenhagen airport and, before anyone could notice, quietly arrested him.
‘Microphones were everywhere’
Speaking to the Guardian as he prepares for trial, Findsen appears relaxed, though there is undoubtedly a quiet anger as he describes the events of the past three years.
Released from prison in February 2022 after 70 days in custody, Findsen technically remains head of the spy agency DDIS, albeit suspended and on two-thirds salary. He says he cannot be certain he’s not still under surveillance.
Suddenly finding himself in prison, he says, was strange. “There were no other spy chiefs,” he jokes. He says he established good relations with the other prisoners. “They were much younger than me. They were there for things like drugs, arms dealing and kidnapping, so it was a different environment for me.”
Findsen’s close ties to the domestic service, which he previously ran after 9/11, added to the sense of betrayal when he came to understand colleagues had authorised a surveillance operation against him, which he believes lasted for more than a year.
“The microphones were everywhere,” he says, not just in his kitchen and living rooms, but in his car and holiday home.
Callout
In custody, he was shown the surveillance reports being used as evidence against him. His daily family life was described in the kind of documents he’d spent a career in intelligence reading. “I was talking to my children when they came back from school and things like that.”
Perhaps unusually for a spy chief, Findsen had developed relationships with journalists, on which he’s believed to have relied to counter negative stories about DDIS once sent home in 2020 after the watchdog’s damning statement.
Prosecutors allege that Findsen shared state secrets with two reporters, as well as close relatives, his girlfriend and an old friend. Much about the case remains shrouded in secrecy but Danish journalists reported last year that prosecutors allege Findsen’s conversations related to the NSA cable-tapping partnership.
In April 2021, for example, he is alleged to have spoken to his 84-year-old mother about the whistleblower who raised the alarm about the deal. Many of the conversations, it is alleged, risked causing “significant damage” to Denmark’s “security and relations with foreign powers”. Unable to discuss the specific charges, Findsen describes them as “crazy and ridiculous”.
As for the whistleblower, he remains an elusive protagonist at the heart of the affair. Now in his 40s, he’s never spoken publicly. He no longer works at DDIS and appears to be living a quiet life in the countryside running a small cybersecurity business. He did not respond to the Guardian’s requests for comment.
State secrets in the public domain
In December 2021, a week after the Frederiksen, the former minister, mentioned the NSA cable-tapping deal on television, police officers turned up at his home. Standing outside the thatched fisherman’s cottage, the officers informed the 76-year-old he’d been charged with treason.
The charges have been brought under a section of the criminal code last used against an East German Stasi agent in 1979. It is the same law that is being used in Findsen’s case but Frederiksen is accused of disclosing classified information in media appearances rather than in private. He denies revealing state secrets in the interviews, since the information he shared – which he can no longer repeat – had been in the public domain since the 2014 Snowden story.
“The present government is of the opinion that a secret is a secret,” Frederiksen says. “It might have been described in the newspapers, but they still say it’s a secret.” In court, the trial is expected to turn on whether an open secret can still be a state secret.
The paradox in both cases is that Findsen and Frederiksen, according to people who know them, are staunch believers in DDIS’s US partnership and proud of its special relationship with the NSA. They are not themselves whistleblowers.
Prosecutors are nevertheless seeking custodial sentences for both men. Frederiksen believes the courts will ultimately find it hard to send someone in his mid-70s to prison, and says he will “fight to the bitter end”. The strain on him is clear.
After retiring as an MP last year following 22 years in frontline politics, his time is now spent talking to defence lawyers as well as visiting his wife each day at a care home. She has Alzheimer’s and does not understand the legal jeopardy her husband faces.
“I thought my retirement would mean peaceful periods where my wife and I could have travelled,” he said. “But everything just went wrong and I was accused of serious crimes.”
A sense of disbelief
The former minister believes that Denmark’s centre-left prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, must have ultimately authorised the prosecutions.
“I’m fully convinced that this is a political case,” he says. “It’s a decision that had to be made at a very high level.”
Former officials agreed that the decision to pursue the cases and spy on an intelligence chief is likely to have been signed off by a security committee chaired by the prime minister. They also point to the fact that prosecutions under the rarely used section of the criminal code require the approval of a senior minister.
Denmark’s justice minister, Peter Hummelgaardsaid in a statement: “I’d like to emphasise that neither the prime minister, myself, the former minister for justice, nor any other minister in the government has approved investigative steps taken in the cases against Frederiksen and Findsen.”
In Copenhagen, among the officials, former spies and journalists who spoke to the Guardian for this article, there’s a sense of disbelief about what’s transpired.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think that something like this was possible in Denmark,” says Hans Davidsen-Nielsen, a reporter at Politiken.
The veteran security reporter is one of the journalists who prosecutors allege received classified information from Findsen. He may be called as a witness in the trial this autumn, and says he will refuse to testify, preferring to risk punishment rather than discuss his sources.
Shortly after Findsen’s arrest in 2021, police summoned several other journalists as witnesses as part of a wider leak investigation. At around the same time, the intelligence agencies held meetings with the top news publishers and warned them that journalists could also be charged for disclosing classified information.
“The case has had a massive impact on the free press in Denmark,” according to Davidsen-Nielsen. “Official sources have now to a great extent disappeared because they do not dare talk to us.”
Frederiksen believes the forthcoming criminal trials are part of a wider crackdown against leaks from officials. “The idea is to scare officials in the secret services but also in the central ministries in Copenhagen.” The government, he says, is trying to warn them: “You should see what happens when you talk to journalists.”
Additional reporting by Lucy Hough
