A Norwegian appeals court has upheld the conviction of a former security guard at the US Embassy in Oslo for espionage, while reducing his prison sentence by one month.
The Norwegian citizen, who is in his 20s, will now serve three years and six months in prison. His defence team is expected to challenge the ruling before Norway’s Supreme Court.
According to Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, the former guard admitted during the proceedings that he had passed information obtained through his work at the US Embassy to individuals linked to Russian and Iranian intelligence services.
He has nevertheless denied committing a criminal offence. His defence argues that the information he disclosed was neither classified nor of a nature that could seriously endanger Norway’s national interests.
Much of the material reportedly concerned routine observations about people entering and leaving the US Embassy while the defendant was working security shifts. The court nevertheless found that collecting information with the intention of passing it to foreign intelligence services could constitute a criminal act, even where the material itself was not formally classified.
The defendant has largely accepted the factual account presented during the trial. He also told the court that Washington’s position on the Israel-Palestinian conflict influenced his decision to establish contact with Russian intelligence representatives, followed later by contacts with Iranian agents.
He said his first meeting with a Russian contact took place in Serbia in 2024. Norwegian security authorities subsequently identified the contact as Vladimir Kalinov, a former Russian diplomat.
The former guard also acknowledged that he sometimes exaggerated or embellished the information he supplied in an effort to make it appear more significant to his contacts.
However, he has consistently rejected the suggestion that the material he provided could have caused serious harm to the United States or Norway.
Defence lawyer John Christian Elden told NRK that the appeals court's reasoning was significant because it found that his client had neither possessed nor disseminated confidential information.
“We note that the court believes our client has neither held nor spread any confidential material,” Elden said, while arguing that the court nevertheless considered the collection of information for subsequent dissemination to be punishable.
Although the appeals court reduced the original sentence by one month, Elden indicated that the defence intends to bring the case before Norway’s Supreme Court.
The case highlights the legal difficulties surrounding intelligence-gathering offences, particularly where information obtained from a sensitive diplomatic environment is not itself classified but is collected for potential use by foreign intelligence services. Photo by Ahz, Wikimedia commons.