There is a common trope in journalism about the Arctic—that the melting of polar ice is setting up a geopolitical competition over resources that evokes the “Great Game,” the 19th century British and Russian rivalry in Central and South Asia. But when journalist Ben Taub set out to report on that narrative, in early 2022, it quickly unraveled. What came into focus instead was far more urgent and ominous: an espionage war at the Arctic border of Norway and Russia, centered on preparations for nuclear war.
Military and intelligence services see the world through the matrix of intention and capacity. The Russians want to preserve the capability to carry out nuclear strikes from submarines in Arctic waters. “The whole Russian plan is that, if things really heat up with NATO, they need to create a buffer,” Johan Roaldsnes, the regional Norwegian counterintelligence chief, said. “That means the ability to control their closest neighboring territory”—northeastern Norway—“and control access to the waters, to prevent anyone from getting close.”
For the past decade, Russia's military and intelligence services have been experimenting with hybrid warfare and influence operations in northeastern Norway, and then replicating them across Europe. Most attacks are deliberately murky, and difficult to attribute. They have turned the Norwegian border area into a kind of crucible, where some operations have been so disorienting and destabilizing that, to try and understand what was happening in her district, the regional police chief started reading Sun Tzu.
For this project, Taub spent two-and-a-half years traveling to the Arctic parts of Norway, culminating in a three-month stay, a few miles from Russia, for the duration of polar winter. Here, in the borderlands, everyday life is imbued with geopolitical significance, and the stakes are visible in what little infrastructure exists amid the vast, unyielding wilderness: radar balls, listening stations, relay towers, a microwave-communications network for the military.
Taub traversed roughly 70 kilometers (43.5 miles) of the border, mostly in snowshoes, and bunked with Norwegian conscripts in remote military outposts whose walls were coated in ice. The conditions on some patrols were so extreme that eyelashes turned to icicles, and neck buffs froze solid. He also tagged along for a NATO military exercise in the Arctic, and flew on a U.S. Navy plane, as its crew collected intelligence on Russian warships and auxiliary vessels in the Barents Sea.
For almost two months, last winter, Taub didn’t see the sun. But that was the point—to set the story mostly in darkness, to evoke the core challenge of counterintelligence work: that you can’t see what’s around you, even if you know that it is there.
