One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway

by Åsne Seierstad

  Two weeks later, the Director of Public Prosecution dismissed the complaint on formal grounds. The International Criminal Court would be the appropriate legal authority for such a case.

  The hot summer faded, autumnal weather came sweeping in and the wind whistled. It was the coldest autumn in living memory, and Anders still had not been called in for interview.

  The chair of the nomination committee never read anything that Anders posted on the internet, but he had met him.

  ‘He seems pleasant and reasonable,’ was Høegh Henrichsen’s assessment, ‘but isn’t he a bit vague?’

  Anders Behring had failed to make any particular impression on the older man. He had only come to a couple of meetings and had not distinguished himself there. His name had been put into the ring along with a list of other names, but no one from Anders’s local ‘adult’ branch – Majorstuen-Uranienborg – felt he was the right man. It was the local branch that had to interview and approve individuals from their district who were proposed to the nomination committee. For them it was the personal impression that counted, not anyone’s empire-building on the internet.

  He was not weighed and found wanting.

  He was not even weighed.

  He was never called for interview.

  His name did not go on the list.

  Just before Christmas, the nomination list was finalised. Two youth candidates were nominated. Jøran was on the list. Lene was on the list.

  * * *

  Anders’s posts on the forum grew more negative. ‘The sad thing about the political system in Norway is that it often isn’t the most competent who get political power, but those who are best at networking.’

  He told people that Jøran Kallmyr had promised to support his candidature, but had stabbed him in the back instead. That was what stopped him becoming a leader in the party, he explained to his online buddy PeeWee. ‘Kallmyr went behind my back.’

  ‘How the h … is the PPY supposed to recruit voters under 30 if they haven’t any high-profile young parliamentarians???’ he wrote in the new year, and, ‘The way I see it, the central executive committee has been far too passive when it comes to developing a comprehensive youth strategy! Is there any kind of strategy at all??’

  He was a nobody, and it was almost election time.

  Jøran was voted onto the council and Lene was elected a substitute member. Soon, Jøran was appointed a secretary to a local government commissioner and later a commissioner, and Lene became a regular council member.

  In one of his last posts in the summer of 2003, Anders predicted civil war once the Muslims were in the majority in Norway. The Islamisation of the West was alarming.

  On that last point, many in the Progress Party agreed with him.

  For his part, he had lost interest in the party. He stopped going along to the offices or to their social events. If they didn’t want him, he didn’t want them either. He moved on, out into the world. Without Jøran; without Lene.

  ‘High Quality Fake Diplomas!!’

  E Tenebris ad Lucem

  From Darkness into Light

  Motto of the St John Lodge

  ‘Saint Olaus to the Three Pillars’

  Sales of false diplomas had taken off. He made his first million.

  He made his second million.

  He was actually getting rich.

  The money was pouring into accounts in tax havens like Antigua and Barbuda, St Vincent and the Bahamas. He had also opened accounts in Latvia and Estonia. That way, he could avoid paying tax in Norway. The banks offered him anonymous credit cards that meant he could make withdrawals from ATM machines in Oslo without his name being registered.

  His mother helped him with this money laundering. He had asked her to open three bank accounts. There she deposited the cash her son gave her, before transferring it to him. Within a short space of time she had laundered four hundred thousand kroner.

  He got the idea while he was still active in the Progress Party. It had struck him that there could be a market for false diplomas and he set up a website, diplomaservices.com, in the autumn of 2002.

  His company, City Group, operated through addresses such as bestfakediploma.com and superfakedegree.com. They advertised ‘Bachelor’s, master’s and doctorate diplomas available in the field of your choice’. Double exclamation marks were sprinkled across the pages. ‘Receive a high quality fake diploma within 10 days!!’ ran the headline in bold italics. The cost was around a hundred dollars per diploma, and the customer was promised a full refund if he could find better print quality anywhere else. For those wanting a complete package of exam certificate plus graduation diploma from a particular university, there was a special-offer price of 295 dollars.

  A young man in Indonesia drew up the diplomas to order and then emailed them to Anders in Oslo for approval. There were medical-school diplomas, doctorates and engineering qualifications, diplomas from organisations and societies, even prize certificates. Sometimes Anders did a first draft and then sent it to his employee in Asia, to whom he paid a monthly salary of seven hundred dollars.

  The web pages brought in orders for several hundred diplomas a month. The company occupied most of Anders’s time, apart from weekends, when he would be out on the town spending his money, freely at times but never recklessly. Anders had landed himself a nice circle of friends: young men from the West End, some from the School of Commerce, a classmate or two from primary-school days, a few others who had turned up along the way.

  He had moved out of the collective in Maries gate and was now renting his own flat in Tidemands gate, not far from where he had lived with his fellow students. His mother came round to clean and tidy for him and took his washing home with her. For this Anders paid her in cash, a few thousand kroner a month.

  The orders started piling up. His associate in Indonesia was not that fluent in English and there were quite a lot of corrections to be done. Anders needed somebody who could check the diplomas and add the finishing touches.

  In the advertisement he placed through a government employment scheme, he said he was looking for someone to handle the graphics side. The only specification was experience of Photoshop and CorelDRAW, a graphic-design package. The applicant also had to be free to start at once.

  Mads Madsen had only done a short course in drawing, design and colour at upper secondary school, but he was familiar with the two computer programs and fired off an application on spec.

  In the very first days of 2005 he was invited to the offices of the E-Commerce Group, which was the new company name. The young man was offered the graphic designer job. But once his role was fully explained to him, he hesitated.

  ‘Is it legal?’

  ‘As long as we don’t forge official stamps or anything like that, it’s legal,’ replied the besuited managing director. ‘It’s been tested in court in the US.’

  He called them decorative diplomas. ‘Your job is to check for spelling mistakes and evaluate the composition.’

  On its website, E-Commerce Group covered itself legally by saying that the diplomas were intended as props in films and so on.

  The truth was that they never asked customers, merely assumed the diplomas were for decorative purposes, or to replace documents that had been lost or destroyed. Anders had made a template for signatures, which Mads was to use. Anders called it a joke signature: it was not meant to imitate that of any actual university vice-chancellor and thus not illegal.

  The salary offered was generous: Mads would get thirty thousand kroner a month. He proved to be quick and efficient.

  One day, Anders asked him if he would rather work for cash. Mads could then avoid paying tax and keep more of the money for himself. The employee didn’t want to. So he carried on receiving monthly pay slips stating the amount of tax paid.

  After a while Anders asked him to dress more smartly, in a shirt and tie. Mads refused, and carried on wearing his jumper and jeans.

  Then Anders started taunting his employee abo
ut being a vegetarian and tried to get him to come out for a decent meal. Mads said he was trying to leave the smallest possible footprint on earth when he was gone.

  Anders became obsessed with catching Mads out, with discovering something unethical about him. ‘If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a hypocrite,’ he said.

  * * *

  Most of his acquaintances from the School of Commerce had now embarked on university and college courses. Magnus, one of his childhood friends, had become a firefighter, another was applying for jobs in the shipping industry. Lots of them were getting steady girlfriends, some even had partners they lived with, while others had strings of one-night stands. Anders did none of this, but he kept tabs on it all. One friend had been to bed with hundreds of women, he reckoned. He himself generally went home on his own. He didn’t appeal to the girls and they didn’t appeal to him. He complained to his friends that the Norwegian girls were too liberated and would never make good housewives. His friends laughed and told him to stop talking rubbish. Who wanted a housewife?

  Then he did something his friends found rather strange. In December 2004 he ordered the contact details of ten women from a dating website in the Ukraine. In February the following year he ordered ten more. In all, he paid one hundred euros to the website, which featured the profiles of thousands of women from Eastern Europe.

  When a female friend pointed out that acquiring a bride by mail order was not what boys of his age usually did, his other friends made light of it, saying he could be a bit odd sometimes.

  The women he chose were blue-eyed and slim, with girlish figures. They were all younger than him, mostly teenagers.

  He picked two photos from his most recent batch of downloads. One was dark-haired, the other blonde. He couldn’t make his mind up, so he asked his mother.

  When he showed her the two pictures, she pointed to the fairer one.

  She was Natascha from Belarus.

  He wrote and received an immediate reply. They emailed back and forth for a couple of weeks. In March he left the office under supervision of Mads and took a trip to Minsk.

  Natascha, who had grown up in a workers’ district on the edge of the Belarus capital, was fascinated by the good-looking, well-mannered, nicely dressed Norwegian and liked what he had to say about himself: his education, his company, his status. The only thing was, she found it a bit hard to understand everything he said. Natascha didn’t speak much English, and Anders used so many difficult words.

  At home with her parents, he was served blini – Russian pancakes. He asked about radiation in the area and was careful not to consume too much locally produced food or contaminated water. He asked various people how many had died as a result of the radioactivity ‘to get an overview of the hazards’.

  On his return home a bare week later, he spoke enthusiastically of Natascha. She was blonde and stylish, he said.

  Later in the spring he bought her a ticket so she could come and visit him in Oslo. His mother thought she was pretty and was very taken with her. ‘It must be true love,’ she told a friend, ‘because it’s the first time Anders has ever invited a girl round to meet his mother.’ Anders had told his mother that Natascha lived in reduced circumstances in a very basic block of flats and was not used to anything else. Wenche thought that would be an advantage. ‘Because a demanding girl won’t do for Anders.’

  She framed a picture she had taken of the couple when they all had dinner together and put it on the sideboard in her living room. ‘Isn’t it a bit too soon?’ a friend who lived in the same block of flats had asked.

  ‘Oh no, they’re so much in love, you’ll see,’ Wenche had replied.

  * * *

  But it turned out that Natascha was not as easy to cope with as Anders had hoped.

  His friends were sceptical about the Belarussian girl. All she wanted to do was go shopping and hand the bill to Anders, they said. She had probably been expecting something more than his little bachelor flat, Anders thought. Perhaps she was disappointed that he wasn’t more extravagant in his spending habits.

  For her part, she said the chemistry between them had gone and that he didn’t respect her.

  She called him a male chauvinist.

  He called her a gold-digger.

  Natascha was put on a plane home, and later married a church organist in a small town in America.

  The person who was saddest about the break-up was Wenche.

  When she finally took down the photo, a long time after Natascha’s departure, she said Anders ‘hadn’t been able to afford to keep her’.

  The fact that all Anders’s friends were finding nice girlfriends while he was still on his own was a sore point with her.

  The Natascha affair came as a blow to Anders. His vision of the ideal woman had turned out to be nothing but a dream. He was the type who would rather comment on the appearance of women in pictures, like Pamela Anderson, than on real girls he met. Women of flesh and blood were problematic. Some of his friends concluded he wasn’t interested in the opposite sex.

  One evening when he was out in town, he ran into his former partner from his time selling billboard space. Kristian was still working for the company that had bought up their mobile advertising idea. They stopped to chat at the bottom of Hegdehaugsveien, an exclusive shopping street which in the evenings was a social hub for yuppies and fashion babes. Kristian thought Anders looked a bit lost, a bit slumped inside that blazer of his, his face set beneath its foundation. They were both slightly inebriated. Kristian let slip something he had been thinking for a long time.

  ‘Come out of the closet, Anders!’

  Anders gave a strained laugh and pushed his friend away. Kristian refused to be shaken off, not wanting to drop the subject.

  ‘You’ve got to come out, we’re living in the twenty-first century, for God’s sake!’

  Anders twisted free. ‘Ha,’ he said. ‘You’re talking to the wrong person.’

  Kristian had always thought Anders was gay, but it was the first time he had dared bring it up. ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ said a mutual friend who had himself just come out. Kristian’s girlfriend thought the same. ‘Definitely gay,’ had always been her view of Anders. ‘He plainly isn’t interested in women. He just pretends,’ she said.

  Anders’s friends also jeered at him for looking like a pansy. Anders and his make-up, Anders and his giggling, Anders and his affected voice. Anders who always had to do a few quick push-ups as a prelude to a night on the town, who never had a girlfriend but talked enthusiastically about prostitutes and the legalisation of brothels.

  You could hide behind that sort of blokey façade. There was no threatening proximity, no awkward intimacy.

  He called himself metrosexual, a man who loved women but also liked dressing up and wearing make-up.

  Now he was denying it outright. Like men, him? It was the last thing he’d ever do, he liked blondes.

  ‘Anders, you can’t carry on living a lie!’ said Kristian. ‘Things will be better if you tell it like it is.’

  They had been standing there for almost an hour. ‘Things will work out if you do,’ promised Kristian, there at the crossroads by the royal park, with people staggering past them on their way to parties, on their way from parties.

  Anders curled his mouth into a smile and brushed an invisible speck of dust from his blazer.

  That bloody jacket, thought Kristian. It’s ghastly, looks completely ridiculous. He’s got no sense and no style.

  They parted in anger.

  * * *

  Things were less congenial at the office. Mads and Anders did not argue, nor did they really hit it off. And something had happened to Anders. He spent more and more time at his computer screen.

  Mads no longer liked his job very much. The work was quite monotonous. Once he had corrected the spelling mistakes made by their co-worker in Indonesia he had to print out the diplomas on thick paper and send them by post to the customers. Sometimes he was sent on lit
tle errands such as going to withdraw money at the bank or the post office.

  Mads was getting bored, and as the summer approached he handed in his notice.

  ‘Fine,’ said Anders, his expression not revealing what he might think about being alone in the office again.

  Over the summer holidays, Mads had a phone call from Norway’s major broadsheet, Aftenposten. The paper had run a piece on falsified diplomas at Norwegian universities and had now come by more information about dubious practices of that kind. A company in the US had flagged up four websites selling fake diplomas. They had written a letter to the Norwegian authorities and asked them to check up on Breivik’s activities.

  Aftenposten was trying to get hold of Anders, but could only find Mads.

  ‘I don’t understand any of this and I don’t know the websites you mention. I’m not behind any of it,’ the newspaper quotes Mads as saying in September 2005, referring to him merely as an unemployed twenty-five-year-old in whose name the company was registered.

  Aftenposten wrote that ‘after wading through lots of print in which the sellers use all the talent at their disposal to disclaim responsibility for any serious use of the documents, we reach the assertion that the certificates and diplomas are intended for “entertainment use”’. The paper did not disclose the identity of Anders Behring Breivik, but stated that the person in question was ‘a named Norwegian from Oslo’.

  The Justice Department asked the Director of Public Prosecution to assess the legality of the operations at bestfakediploma.com and superiordiploma.com.

  Anders was skating on thin ice.

  The week the article was published, Anders completed a three-day shooting course at Oslo Pistol Club.

  * * *

  The week after the feature in Aftenposten came the day of the general election. Anders was no longer active in the Progress Party after being ignominiously passed over, but he carried on paying his membership fees and he went to cast his vote. The party was still the place in which he felt most at home politically and it had a good election, winning 22 per cent of the vote.