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

by Åsne Seierstad

  But it was still a long time until July.

  The Chemist’s Log

  Maybe it was the sulphur vapour, maybe it was the steroids, but he had grown more careless, in fact almost fearless. It was tedious having to stand there keeping an eye on the boiling sulphuric acid. This was the third day in a row he had been watching over it. He had to let it boil away for many hours and reach a concentration of more than 70% before it started to give off the dense black smoke; now he didn’t bother waiting until nightfall. The acid followed its own rhythm and took no account of night or day.

  The fridge was empty and he needed to do some shopping. But he could not afford to waste valuable boiling time by turning off the hotplate. He was behind schedule, so decided to take a chance and briefly desert the bubbling acid. He could turn the hotplate to a low setting, after all. He was in the hallway putting on his lab gear and protective goggles to go out and turn the temperature down when he glanced out of the window. A neighbour was outside.

  He tore off the apron and calmly went out.

  ‘Good morning,’ he said, cautiously cheerful.

  The neighbour asked about a BMW. The farm owner, the one who was in prison, had a car in the upper barn and the neighbour had promised to fix it for him by the time he got out.

  That really was close. He was still shaking as he tried to make a genial impression, chatting and giving the neighbour enough petrol to drive the car away.

  Later he advised the readers of his log: you ought to try to generate as much goodwill as possible from your neighbours. ‘The goodwill will be returned indirectly by them not probing and investigating. If you get visits from neighbours, be polite and friendly, offer them sandwiches and coffee, unless it will jeopardise the operation.’

  It seemed like too much of a risk to leave the sulphuric acid boiling while he was out after all, so he postponed operations until the evening. He had to buy food, so he went into the village and bought red meat, bread and sweets, and made himself a large meal when he got back to the farm. Once it was dark he went outside, and in the course of the night he reduced all the sulphuric acid.

  The following day he went to Oslo to fetch some packages. The post office had sent his mother notification of several parcels to be collected. He went back to the farm with distilled water, microballoons and a set of dumbbells.

  Half an hour from home, he gave a start when he saw a car parked at the side of the road. An unmarked police car, he thought. Closer to the farm he saw a car that could be another police vehicle. I’m about to be arrested, he thought. A short distance before the driveway to the farm, he turned off his engine and lit a cigarette. Was it all over now? There might already be a big police team waiting for him at Vålstua. All his weapons were in the farmhouse. Should he flee? But where to?

  Once he had stubbed out the cigarette he started the car and drove slowly along to the farm with his fog lights on, so he would have an advantage if the police were in front of him.

  The barn door was standing wide open. Somebody was there! They doubtless had the place surrounded and were closing in on him, or perhaps they were waiting in the main building. He got out of the car and approached the farmhouse. Locked himself in, fetched his Glock and searched the house and barn for surveillance equipment. Apart from the wind, all was quiet. Perhaps they had gone. Perhaps they had installed cameras.

  ‘Paranoia can be a good thing, or it can be a curse,’ he wrote in his diary. It must have been the wind that wrenched the barn door open. He swore never to let paranoia get the better of him again. If they came to get him there was nothing he could do in any case, so there was no point worrying.

  The tender growth in the surrounding countryside was greener and more intense with every passing day. The birds were on their nests and the cherry trees were in bloom. While there was lots of activity in the fields all around, his own land lay fallow. Clover and timothy flourished in the rich soil, giving off a sweetish scent. Still, the smell of something rotten hung over the farm at Vålstua.

  * * *

  He had six tonnes of fertiliser. Half of it non-detonable, ordered so as not to arouse suspicion. Now, he was going to transfer three tonnes of it to fifty-kilo bags, pick them up with the forklift truck, take them over to the barn and heave them on to a handcart, and then wheel them in. Though he had only managed to move a fraction of the fertiliser, he was exhausted after the first day.

  Fertiliser is delivered in pellet form, each pellet coated in a water-repellent material. To make it detonable, it has to be soaked in diesel. So the pellets had to be crushed in order to become explosive.

  He cleaned the barn floor and spread the contents of one of the fertiliser bags evenly across it. Then he rolled his heaviest dumbbell over the fertiliser and shovelled up the crushed pellets before they could absorb any moisture from the air. He had worked it all out on paper and estimated that he would be able to crush fifty kilos in twenty minutes.

  His plan failed. The method did not work. The first bag took him two hours, and the fertiliser absorbed moisture much faster than he had expected. The pellets ended up only partially crushed, and his back was soon aching from rolling the dumbbell to and fro across the floor.

  ‘Fuck, why can’t anything go as planned???? And the dumbbell set cost me a total of 750 euro and now it has proven to be worthless … what do I do now?’ He decided to raise his spirits with a three-course meal in Rena. There he remembered something he had read about ‘a Marxist terrorist traitor in the early 70s. I believe he was called Baader or it could have been Meinhof, terror prostitutes for the Soviets and the loyal dhimmi whores of the Islamic Ummah’, who had used electric mixers to crush the pellets at home in their apartment. Breivik decided to try out the Marxists’ method. If a 1970s mixer could do it, the more modern types should definitely be able to.

  The next day he went to various suppliers and bought twelve different mixers and blenders, some on stands and some hand-held, to test which sort worked best. Half of them were unusable. The shape of the container prevented the pellets from going round, or the blades were not sharp enough. But one brand proved effective – Electrolux. Practically all the pellets got crushed and besides, it had a higher speed than the others and could process a good half-kilo of fertiliser pellets in thirty seconds. The next day he went to three different towns and bought six blenders of the same model.

  It was three days until the end of May. The days passed in transferring the fertiliser to smaller bags and preparing it for pulverisation.

  By the last day of May he was so shattered that he had to rest. He could hardly move his fingers and worried the damage might be permanent. The whole day was spent in bed. He would have to make some adjustments; three bags of fertiliser would have to do, not five as originally planned. It was simply too much for one person. So the explosive charge would just have to be smaller.

  On 1 June he still did not feel able to get back to the job, and stayed at his PC, updating the log. On 2 June he also stayed in, surfing the web. Suddenly he heard a car drive up to the property. He peered out through the curtains. A man got out of the car and began taking photos of the farm. Breivik went out into the yard. The man said he had come to take some shots of the Glomma in spate. He’s lying, thought Breivik instinctively. His body language gave him away. He must be a policeman.

  He offered him coffee but the man declined, and Breivik suggested they go down to the riverbank to get the best pictures. The man nodded, but carried on taking pictures of the yard area. ‘Landscape photography,’ he explained. It made Breivik uneasy.

  But he had no choice. He had to go on with his preparations.

  That evening he rang his mother and said an undercover detective had turned up to take pictures of the farmyard. His mother thought that all sounded very peculiar. He also told her about creepy sounds. There was a creaking that really spooked him out.

  ‘When can I come and visit?’ his mother asked. She had enquired several times, but it was never convenient. He said
that he was worn out and the ground was very stony. It was so stony that he would have to grow timothy-grass. She could not always follow what he said any more. This was not a good time to come, either. He wanted to get everything finished first, he said.

  He had four blenders going simultaneously. They made such a noise that he went back to working at nights, as he would never hear if anybody happened to come by. Every time he had crushed enough pellets for a fifty-kilo bag, he poured diesel over them, making sure it soaked in evenly. He then sealed the double-layered bags from China with tape and set them aside.

  He worked mechanically, all the while calculating and recalculating the time it was taking and adjusting the plan in accordance with his working pace. He soon got into a routine. He generally took only forty minutes per sack now, his record was thirty-two. He was making progress. There were ten bags piled in the corner. Twenty bags. Two of the blenders broke. He replaced them with new ones.

  Saturday 4 June. Six bags. Sunday 5 June. Four bags. Two more blenders fell apart. Monday 6 June. Bought two new blenders.

  That afternoon, he reached the end of the third sack. He had now crushed 1600 kilos of fertiliser pellets and soaked them in diesel. There was fertiliser dust everywhere. His green workwear had turned grey. ‘Surely I am going to die from cancer within twelve months as I must have gotten a lot of this crap into my lungs even though I used a 3M mask…’ he wrote in the log, adding: ‘Watching The Shield, a couple of episodes a day on average. I downloaded all seven seasons at the beginning of May.’

  Next phase: to synthesise picric acid, also known as Mother of Satan. He had all the equipment and chemicals he needed. They were easily obtainable, he wrote in the log, ‘unless you’re called Abdullah Rashid Muhammed’.

  To make the bomb go off he had to have a primary and a secondary explosive. The primary one was DDNP – diazodinitrophenol – the secondary was picric acid. He would have to synthesise both of them from scratch.

  A car pulled up outside. Too many goddamned visitors. It was a neighbour who wanted to buy the clover and timothy that had grown on his fallow land. Breivik explained that for various reasons he had not been able to harrow his fields, but that he was intending to grow potatoes and vegetables. The neighbour was surprised to hear his plan and said it was pretty futile growing vegetables in the stony soil round the farm.

  Breivik started talking about a farm he wanted to buy in Røros instead. ‘It’s even harder growing veg in the cold ground up there,’ the neighbour pointed out.

  They took a stroll down to the field, and Breivik was afraid his neighbour might see the fume hood fan sticking out of the living room window. They agreed on a price. The farmer would come back two weeks later to harvest the crop, which had grown wild on nothing but rain and sunshine.

  Weird kind of guy, the neighbour mused on his way home. The new tenant had listened politely, almost servilely, to all his objections. He clearly hadn’t a clue about farming.

  Breivik carried on producing picric acid. Once the first batch was done he put fifty grams of the powder in the oven to make it ready to test it. If correctly made, it should ignite when he tried to set it alight. Nothing happened. The log was strewn with expletives. He’d followed the instructions, hadn’t he? ‘Could the compound I have manufactured be inert???? Unfortunate circumstances rams cock in the arse once again…! I start to have serious doubts and my morale starts to shatter…’

  As dusk approached on Saturday 11 June, heavy clouds came in over the farm. High in the air a thunderstorm was brewing, and big drops of rain came drumming down onto the roof. There was a sudden crash, lightning flashed across the sky, the computer gave a bang and the power went off. When the electricity came back on, the PC was dead.

  Breivik sat down to pray. It was a long time since he had called to God. ‘I explained to God,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘that unless he wanted the Marxist-Islamic alliance and the certain Islamic takeover of Europe to completely annihilate European Christendom within the next hundred years he must ensure that the warriors fighting for the preservation of European Christendom prevail. He must ensure that I succeed with my mission and as such; contribute to inspire thousands of other revolutionary conservative nationalists, anti-communists and anti-Islamists throughout the European world.’

  The PC was still dead.

  * * *

  Two days later he made a test bomb and took it to a remote part of the forest, a few kilometres from the farm. There was still thunder in the air, which was good, because nobody would think twice about a loud bang. He lit the fuse and waited. ‘It was probably the longest ten seconds I have ever endured…’ he wrote afterwards.

  The little lump exploded.

  He drove off straight away, in case anybody came to investigate. He headed to Elverum to celebrate with a slap-up meal. He drove home via the detonation site to study the small crater. The DDNP had exploded as it should, but the dried picric acid had largely failed to detonate. He would have to purify it still further.

  In mid-June his financial mask began to slip. Ten of his credit card bills were due and he had received formal reminders about various other amounts he owed. If it went as far as debt recovery and his creditworthiness was in doubt, he would not be able to hire a car and it would be well nigh impossible to carry out the plan. The biggest unpaid bill was for the fertiliser, but nor had he paid last month’s rent on the farm. The bills for the fume hood fan, the hotplate stirrer and the spare fan he had not even used were now due. He had just one week to find almost eighty thousand kroner. As well as withdrawing as much cash as he could from those ten credit card accounts, he would also have to ring the farming cooperative and ask for extra time to settle their bill.

  He managed to defer payment for half the fertiliser, and wrote in his log that he could ‘keep my head above water until mid-July’.

  His activities at Vålstua were extremely hazardous. The barn was full of chemicals, the liquids were unstable and his working process was experimental. He had scarcely any safety measures. Sometimes he freaked out when he read about security precautions and all the eventualities that could lead to explosions. Contact with air was dangerous; contact with metal, concrete and plastic could increase static electricity and cause a detonation. So could friction and impact, and proximity to petrol, diesel and electric sockets. He was scared of what would happen to him if the explosive material went off. ‘The blast wave/flame would probably cauterise my wounds, resulting in an extended and extremely painful death.’ He made sure to keep the Glock to hand in his working area, so if he survived an explosion but lost his arms he could still shoot himself in the head by pulling the trigger with his toes.

  Everything was covered in a layer of grey aluminium powder. The strong fluids and acids were gradually staining and eating into the floors and furniture.

  After a long night’s work towards the end of June, he woke up at eleven the next morning to find that he had received a text message. It was from the girlfriend of the convicted hash-grower and had been sent an hour and a half before. She wrote that she was on her way to pick up some stuff from the barn. In that case, she could be there within the half-hour.

  It would take him at least twelve hours to clear up and make the barn presentable, dismantle his equipment, sweep up and clean the place. That meant he would have no choice but to kill her on arrival and then evacuate the farm. He rang her. Luckily she had not yet left. They arranged that she would come two days later. He used the two days for thorough cleaning and tidying. He had to move all the equipment down into the ‘spider cellar’ full of cobwebs, hide the damaged tabletops under cloths and the floors with rugs. It set him back by at least two days.

  She arrived late in the evening and wanted to stay the night. Breivik got up early the next morning to check whether she was snooping round. If she got suspicious, he would have to kill her. She was hard to read, so when she had packed up and was ready to leave he offered her a bite to eat so he could try to glean a bit more about wha
t she had seen.

  He also tested out a few of the ideas from his book on her, but no, she did not want to discuss politics. He poured her more coffee. They chatted. She did not seem to have noticed anything. He could let her live.

  * * *

  The farm stank of chemicals: ‘it smells like fresh egg fart,’ he wrote in the log. He had to shut the windows to help the liquid reach room temperature more quickly and he worried about his health and everything he had inhaled.

  Then his network interface card shorted again and he was without a PC. He ordered a new card and carried on with the production of DDNP. Once he had purified the last batch of picric acid, he went off to Elverum and bought three portions of Chinese takeaway, beef with noodles and fried rice. ‘Yummy! I took an early night as I didn’t have a PC.’

  The next day he went to pick up the new network interface card and started paying bills. When he had paid nine out of the ten credit card bills there was another power cut and the computer short-circuited. Seconds later he heard a clap of thunder. ‘What the hell, not again!!! And it isn’t even raining!!’ How was it possible to be so unlucky, he asked in his log, just two hours after he had repaired the PC after the last stroke of lightning? He watched an episode of the TV series Rome and tucked into the last portion of Chinese takeaway to help him over his setback.

  The following day he filtered crystals out of the picric acid. There were fewer than he had reckoned on. He had to be more accurate and decided to take some time out. He gave himself Sunday evening off to go to the Rena festival but did not think much of the choice of local foods on offer – organic kid meat, smoked sausage, crispbread, cheese and honey – so he took himself off to Elverum for some more Chinese takeaway.