The Bomb that Disappeared
The journalist behind the book behind the movie
My name is Flemming Blicher, and this is a podcast episode where I will read from a book called Magtens Bog (The Book of Power). It was edited by Erik Valeur, Peter J. Schødt, Ulrik Dahlin, and Arne Gaardmand. And The section I will read is called “The Bomb That Disappeared.”
So why do I want to read about this bomb that disappeared? It’s about the Thule Air Base in Greenland (since 2023, Pituffik Space Base). It is because, at the turn of the year from 2023 to 2024, Denmark is facing the fact that our foreign minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, has already signed an agreement with Antony Blinken, the US Secretary of State, to surrender Danish sovereignty, initially over three different air bases, Skrydstrup, Karup, and Aalborg, where the Americans can build bases where they can station as many soldiers and weapons as they want. The Americans already have access to the Port of Esbjerg, which is currently being expanded into an even larger NATO landing port.
Esbjerg as a NATO port is about the Americans landing a lot of material, which they then send on to Europe from Esbjerg. So the Americans are already present in Denmark. And this is where we also come to the fact that the Americans have also been present at the Thule base in Greenland, which is part of Danish territory.
And that is why I want to read this. I want to read this section from the book called “Magtens bog” (The Book of Power). And I want to read the section called “The Bomb That Disappeared,” which is about a bomb that disappeared in and around Thule Air Base in Greenland. The case dates back to 1957, when Prime Minister H.C. Hansen gave the Americans the desired permission to use “special weapons” at Thule Air Base.
But the permission must be kept secret. For many years thereafter, the official Danish policy is that nuclear weapons may not be used on or from Danish territory. On January 21, 1968, a B-52 bomber, one of the U.S. Air Force’s B-52s, crashes in flames on the ice near Thule.
In the days that follow, the Americans instruct everyone involved that this was an emergency landing and that all four of the plane’s hydrogen bombs have burned up. And so, this is a series of events that makes Greenland an unwilling party to the Cold War. I will read it aloud:
For almost 40 years, the letter that gave the Americans permission to use Thule Air Base for training and overflights with nuclear weapons was kept secret. When it was made public, the previous perception of Danish foreign and defense policy after World War II came under severe pressure.
From 1959 and for several years thereafter, the Americans stored 48 smaller and, for a short period, four larger nuclear bombs at Thule Air Base. This was contrary to the official Danish position. The secret was so well kept that neither the Greenlandic population, the Home Rule Government, the Danish population, the Folketing (Danish Parliament), nor the government knew about the permission.
The bomb that disappeared
by Poul Brink.
The lights from Thule Air Base appeared in the distance. The enormous B-52 aircraft, which had four incendiary bombs on board, was on fire. Which of them were large enough to destroy a modern metropolis? Pilot John Haug could barely see the instruments in front of him because of the smoke.
Although Thule Air Base was located on Danish territory, the aircraft did not exist in any Danish manual or report. Nevertheless, its mission had been to fly in giant figure eights over the base for hours. When Haug could no longer see the lights from the base below him, he ordered the crew to jump.
He pulled the trigger himself and saw the instrument panel disappear beneath him, while he felt... But he felt nothing. Down on the ice, the hunter Jes Kujaukitsok was riding a dog sled with his family. The polar darkness was broken by a bright spot approaching him and his family.
He stopped the sled and cracked his whip to keep the dogs from starting a fight. It looked as if the fireball had a dark core from which several holes were burning. It had to be an airplane. The burning object passed low over them.
Then it crashed onto the ice with a violent bang, and the sled shook. The plane spewed tongues of fire in all directions. The dogs now sat quietly and stared at the fire. Jess took his son and walked toward the fire. It smelled terrible. They walked until they could no longer stand the heat, then they shouted, “Hello? No one answered.
John Haug woke up and realized he was hanging from a parachute, falling through the darkness of night. His helmet and gloves were gone, and it was bitterly cold. He lost consciousness but woke up again when the parachute shook slightly. It occurred to him that it must be the shock wave from the plane exploding. Then he landed in the snow.
His right leg collapsed when he tried to walk. A lighthouse was rotating on a mountain above him. He found a hangar, but couldn’t get past the snowdrift in front of the door. He managed it at the next hangar, but the huge space was completely deserted. There was a telephone on the wall, and he went over and picked up the receiver.
Hello, this is John Hauk, pilot of the plane that just crashed. No, I don’t know which hangar I’m in, but it’s big. While he waited for them to find him, he found a parked truck and looked in one of the side mirrors. His face was smeared with blood.
My God, what a beautiful sight, he said ironically to himself. Meanwhile, the base radio station had interrupted the pop music and broadcast the news to everyone with dramatic background music. At the same time, a message had already been sent to the White House and the Pentagon. The US had a Broken Arrow code word for a nuclear accident.
A number of bases across America immediately received orders to assemble personnel. The president and some top politicians were informed that there was a special circumstance to the case, that there was a highly secret agreement. That January night in 1968 was the first time it had been necessary to address this very special situation, which had existed since 1957.
H.C. Hansen’s double game
The American ambassador to Denmark in 1957 was a jovial man who was good at appearing in cinema reviews when he helped launch new American-financed warships for the Holmen shipyard or when he inspected Danish egg deliveries to American troops in Germany.
However, his pleasant, teddy bear-like manner must have taken a back seat when, one day in 1957, he sought out the Social Democratic Prime Minister, H.C. Hansen. Ambassador Val Peterson could not have had a more serious errand. He wanted the Danish government to allow the Americans to deploy nuclear weapons in Greenland.
It was a request that held every possibility of conflict and scandal within the alliance. The Danish Social Democrats were opposed to nuclear weapons. Their opposition was even a key issue in the party’s election campaigns. The Americans had also discussed whether it was worth the risk to approach the Danes, or whether they should simply deploy the nuclear weapons without asking the host country.
But the American ambassador had read the Danish prime minister correctly. A few days after the ambassador’s visit, H.C. Hansen sent a letter to the Americans in which he gave them permission to deploy the “special weapons.” At the same time, he asked the US to keep the letter secret, and he did not inform the rest of the government or the Folketing. H.C. Hansen did not want conflict. In this way, he could appease the Americans and give them the right to deploy nuclear weapons somewhere in the kingdom where it would be almost impossible to detect them. At the same time, he could act as the conscience of the world by continuing to say that Denmark was against nuclear weapons.
At the NATO summit in Paris the following month, he defended the new Nordic line, which distanced itself from accepting nuclear weapons.
He said: “As far as the new weapons are concerned, the medium-range missiles in question, and nuclear weapons and ammunition, we will, in accordance with the line we have always taken, not consider it right for our countries to accept these weapons.” At the meeting, H.C. Hansen was taken aside by US Secretary of State John Foster Dawes and thanked for Denmark’s willingness to grant nuclear permission in Greenland. The letter was to become one of the best-kept secrets in Danish history. It was not until 38 years later that the text became known, when I read it out on the TV news.
(And it is the author, Paul Brink, who is a journalist, who reads it out on the TV news.)
The first witnesses. Before the Thule case, I actually believed that Denmark was a unique, honest country where it was impossible, unthinkable, to catch a prime minister in a lie. In 1986, I resigned as union representative at Danmarks Regional Radio in Aarhus.
I wanted to use the time I had left to investigate a major case, and I jokingly said to a colleague that there must be scandals in Denmark that matched those in Italy.
But it was purely by chance that I began to uncover the Thule case, which at that point was not yet a case. At Marselisborg Hospital in Aarhus, a laborer named Ruben Eriksen was undergoing treatment.
He claimed that the wounds on his hands and feet could not be healed because he had participated in the cleanup after an American B-52 hydrogen bomber crashed at Thule Air Base in 1968 with four hydrogen bombs on board. He had been diagnosed with a form of psoriasis, and the treatment was harsh.
He was placed in a kind of transparent tent and sprayed with mustard gas, best known as the poison gas used by the Germans during World War I. Meanwhile, the nurse stood outside the tent wearing a gas mask and protective suit.
Ruben Eriksen had previously approached an American embassy abroad to get them to take up his case, but they had rejected him. “A small man like me cannot do that. It takes greater forces,” was his conclusion.
Professor Hugh Zakaria treated Eriksen and had previously rejected the possibility that there could be a connection between the wounds and the hydrogen bomb accident. But now he had changed his diagnosis because his latest examination showed that Eriksen also suffered from lymphatic cancer. Professor Zakaria was an aristocratic senior physician and professor of the old school.
He did not say that Eriksen was now suffering from cancer due to the hydrogen bomb cleanup, but he said that he could no longer rule out the possibility. I arranged a meeting with Risø (Danish research unit), which had been partly responsible for overseeing the cleanup after the B52 crash in 1968 on the Danish side.
Health physicist Erik Valmod Larsen told me on the phone that there was absolutely no possibility that Danish workers had become ill due to radioactive contamination. Valmod Larsen, together with his colleagues and the American officers, had done a great deal of work that made Eriksen’s claims impossible. And I actually thought that would be the end of the story.
I had great faith in Risø, and I was annoyed with the Danish anti-nuclear activists, who had almost routinely come to hate the institution. But at the same time, I was surprised and disturbed by what another former Thule worker told me. It was Thage Madsen, whom I met at the airfield in Thune. Not Thule, but in Thune near Roskilde.
It was the most practical place because Danish Radio’s morning shifts started at four o’clock, and there was no room in the schedule to take time off for something as vague as atomic bomb research. Fortunately, however, the editing technician Niels had a hobby as a pilot, which meant he constantly needed flying hours.
This made it possible to rent a sports plane from the small grass-covered airfield behind the Radio TV building in Aarhus for a reasonable price, so that one could both attend to one’s news shifts and proceed with personal meetings on the other side of the country.
I considered personal meetings important because I wanted to form an impression of the credibility of the people in question if they made far-reaching attacks on the authorities. When I met Thage Madsen in an airport building, all my instincts told me that he was a man who could be trusted. He was used to working.
He was neatly and properly dressed, but not excessively so. He spoke slowly, but clearly and logically. On the other hand, another part of me was inclined to believe his story. It was about how the Danish authorities had instructed the workers when they were to help clean up the Thule base after the accident in 1968.
Plutonium is not a particularly powerful radioactive substance. Its radiation is mitigated by clothing. On the other hand, it is described as nothing less than the world’s most toxic substance if it gets into a wound or is inhaled.
Tage Madsen claimed that the workers had been gathered in a hangar, whereupon a health physicist from Risø had explained that he would undertake to eat plutonium without anything happening to him. I think his name was Valmod Larsen, says Thage Madsen.
Thage Madsen also explained that he had seen Ruben Eriksen working on hoisting the radioactive snow into containers. Some of it landed next to him and fell into Ruben Eriksen’s ears, who could easily have gotten some on his wrists between his sleeves and gloves or in his airways. Lie or carelessness?
At Risø, health physicists Valmod Larsen and Asger Årkrog had arranged a little demonstration when I arrived. They had obtained a piece of plutonium and a Geiger counter and were now showing how even paper could stop the radiation. They were eager to have me act as a test subject as well. But then we got started on the protocols.
The protocols were key documents in the case, and I was not allowed to look them up myself. They were now on the table between us and came from the various checkpoints that had been set up when the workers left the contaminated area during the cleanup in 1968.
The agreement was that I could ask questions about the records of Ruben Eriksen’s movements in the contaminated area, and the health physicists would then respond. They explained to me that it was impossible for anyone to have brought radioactivity out with them, because everyone had been measured with a Geiger counter, and if it registered, their clothes were burned and they were decontaminated.
Urine samples were also taken each time. I was almost convinced that there was nothing more to be found, but to be on the safe side, I asked if a urine sample had been taken the last time Ruben Eriksen had left the area.
This was based on the simple logical reasoning that if Eriksen had had a urine sample taken the last time he passed the checkpoint, there would be nothing more to find. Because then all the previous passages would have been covered. The two health physicists looked offended, but Valmod Larsen looked it up. No urine samples the last time. None?
Not the last time he crossed the border here, no urine sample was taken. Valmod leafed through the pages, and not the day before either. When is that? It’s March 13. Valmod leafed further back in the log. And there he isn’t either! He went through without any comment other than a ‘0’.
Now Asger Årkrog interrupted and explained that urine tests had not been necessary at all, because nasal swabs had been taken each time to see if anything had entered the airways. I asked them to check whether nasal swabs had always been taken on Eriksen. They had not.
Now I began to wonder why on earth respected scientists were saying that things had happened in a certain way when that was not the case. Had they not expected me to ask such a simple and logical question? Were they deliberately telling me something wrong, or were they just being careless with the truth?
The two then confirmed what Thage Madsen had said about a Danish scientist having said that plutonium was edible. However, it was not Valmod Larsen himself who had said this.
I think it is a memory lapse, because it is something that Jørgen Kok said at one of the very first briefings or orientation meetings, which were held in a very large hall up at Thule Air Base. Valmod explained that he would be willing to eat a gram of this plutonium.
It was astonishing information, and I was surprised that none of the other scientists had objected to information that could only lead the workers to believe that it was almost harmless to handle plutonium.
After that, I made an agreement with Professor Hugh Zakaria that he would examine former Thule workers who believed they were ill, free of charge. I talked about the matter on Radio 1, and a number of people with symptoms came forward. Some were immediately rejected by Zakaria, while he took a closer look at others who he thought looked suspicious.
This led to the question of how much plutonium had actually been in the plane. The more plutonium there was, the more dangerous the cleanup work had obviously been for the workers. However, this was not an easy question to answer. If there is one thing the Americans are secretive about, it is the construction of atomic bombs.
I started making a lot of calls to the US in the evenings after my shifts were over.
Fortunately, the US is such an open society that it is full of information, and it was possible to conclude that there must have been at least a lot more plutonium in the destroyed bombs than the three kilos reported in the reports. Experts guessed that there had been somewhere between 6 and 25 kilos.
The Danish authorities had no good explanation for this problem, other than that the missing plutonium had been blown into the sky during the explosive fire that engulfed the plane and the crushed hydrogen bombs. I began to receive phone calls from people who could contribute exciting theories.
One man called and asked if I was aware that the Meteorological Institute’s records from the days following the accident had been destroyed.
The reason was that an Arctic storm shortly after the accident had behaved differently than the official explanation, so that the plutonium dust had actually returned with the wind and settled like a blanket over the base.
Unfortunately, I had to dismiss this delightful conspiracy theory when a trustworthy man at the Meteorological Institute convinced me that the papers were indeed missing, but that this was due to a subsequent flood in the institute’s basement.
The missing bomb
I began to study another accident to see if it could provide answers to the mysterious questions about the missing plutonium in Thule.
It was the Palomares accident in Spain in 1966, where an American hydrogen bomb aircraft had also crashed. Here, one of the bombs had fallen into the Mediterranean Sea, and it took the US Navy 81 days to locate and salvage it.
The whole affair ended with the US ambassador to Spain and one of Franco’s leading ministers throwing themselves into the waves to show the tourist industry that there was no longer any danger. I noticed in particular that the bombs in the Palomares accident had been deployed in parachutes.
There was no mention of parachutes in the official reports on the Thule accident. But in one of the countless Danish articles from the time of the accident, it was mentioned that the lines to the hydrogen bombs’ parachutes were lying neatly and tidily on the ice when the rescue teams arrived. The article was not published in one of the Danish press’s flagships for investigative journalism. It was in fact published in the Sunday edition of BT (a tabloid newspaper).
On the other hand, it was written by a credible man, namely the later radio director Svend Fugl, who, however, could not remember who his source was when I asked him. It struck me as odd that the American reports spoke of a sea of flames when the plane hit the sea ice off Thule Air Base with its jet fuel, while one of the highly flammable bomb parachutes may have survived. It struck me that a single bomb might not have been destroyed at all, as the Americans and the Danish authorities had claimed. That would simply explain the mystery of the missing plutonium.
The Americans would naturally not be proud of having dropped a bomb on the seabed from one of their large bases on foreign territory. This could give them a motive to keep the matter secret. But why didn’t they just burn the bomb, as they had done off the coast of Spain?
In Spain, it had taken them 81 days to complete the task in mild weather conditions, whereas in Thule, the bay is only ice-free for a few months. There was a possibility that the Americans would have to give up and carry out the task. Then I got in touch with Per Winter, an early worker at Thule, who had now returned home to Jutland.
Winter told his story in an ingenious Jutland Danish dialect, but it was extremely exciting. Are you aware that there is an atomic bomb at the bottom of the fjord off Thule Air Base? I said that I had thought about it, but that I would like to hear how on earth he had come up with that idea.
It turned out that Winter had been a supervisor in a garage used by an American diving team in the summer after the accident in 1968. They brought underwater films with them, which were recorded daily in a mini submarine that cruised around in the icy sea. from the icy waters off the base.
The Americans had taken a liking to Winter and had gradually made him stand in the background while they watched the films. They told him they were looking for a missing bomb, and one day they showed him a large bomb-like object among other wreckage on the video. And they said it was the missing hydrogen bomb.
I tried to poke holes in Winter’s explanations by asking him, among other things, whether it could be one of the huge engines from the B-52 he had been assigned to. He firmly rejected that. He had been involved in changing engines on the emergency-landing B-52s many times, he said. He could not possibly mistake one for another.
And it was not one like that he had seen in the video. I judged Per Winter to be an honest man, and his statement was corroborated by a private video recorded by one of his colleagues, which showed Winter putting the mini-submarine in the water. It was General Electric in the US that had been responsible for the submarine reconnaissance.
In typical American fashion, I was initially met with great goodwill on the phone. Their spokesperson was immediately on a first-name basis with me. It was Paul May this and Paul May that. He promised to look into the matter. The next time, we were still on a first-name basis, but the man had become a little cooler. The whole matter was still classified. The corporation could not possibly comment.
Foreign Minister Uffe Elleman Jensen looked sly when I asked for his comment. He took the pipe out of his mouth and said, “How much do you have on it?” He looked as if he was making some quick calculations when I started talking about a laborer from Jutland. Then he promised to forward the matter to the Americans.
I had a lot of thoughts before I presented the case of the missing plutonium on TV’s Sunday news program in 1987. After all, it’s not every day that you claim there might be a missing hydrogen bomb on the seabed in front of one of the world’s most important American bases.
The series led to the usual angry letters to the editor from the nuclear lobby in Denmark, but for a long time, nothing was heard from the US. Then one day, I was told that a response had now been received from the Americans to the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The submarine films existed. I asked if they showed anything interesting. He couldn’t answer that because it was classified.
But someone must have seen them, otherwise you wouldn’t know what they show. Yes, some officers from the Air Force or another branch of the military have seen them, and they say there is nothing interesting on them. Can I see the films? No, you can’t.
Can I talk to the officers who have seen them? No, you can’t. Can’t you just give me their names? Then I’ll call them myself. No, that wouldn’t be a good idea. Why not? No, it wouldn’t be appropriate.
It seemed a little strange to me that I had now provided the Danish state with something that its representatives should long ago have ensured was in Danish hands, only to be met with such a stiff-necked refusal. But that was the Foreign Ministry for you. Fortunately, a question popped into my head.
So, are these all the films the Americans have sent you? Um, yes, there seems to be a little missing. How much is it? I don’t know exactly. Is it 10 minutes? It’s probably a little more. Is it 20 minutes? 20 minutes. It’s probably a little more. Is it an hour or so? It’s probably a little more than that.
It turned out that 17 hours of video recordings were missing. The senior official assured us that the Americans had not edited the recordings. It was simply a matter of an enormous amount of investigative work, as the clean-up operation after the accident had involved a whole series of military bases around the US.
After some time had passed, the rest of the films arrived in Denmark, but I was still not allowed to see them. The Americans’ position was that there was no intact bomb on the seabed.
Questions and answers
The problem of the missing plutonium was virtually unsolvable.
When I asked the American authorities, they claimed that everything had come to light. So did the Danish leader of the investigation that the Prime Minister’s Office had launched after the many reports about Thule. His name was Kaare Ulbak, and he was the head of the National Institute of Radiation Hygiene.
He had had the opportunity to attend official meetings with the US State Department, the US Air Force headquarters, the Department of Energy, the Oak Ridge University Group, which was in charge of hydrogen bomb research, etc. But then one day in 1995, I became aware that something was going on in the Ministry of Health, which Kaare Ulbak was part of.
I spoke to a head of office, who informed me that I could have a fax sent to me, but that I should also speak to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It sounded exciting, because when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs began to take control of other ministries, it could mean that another country was taking control of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At least, if the US was involved.
A fax arrived with a copy of an official letter from Kaare Ulbak to the Americans. The letter looked completely normal, except for some large spaces between the paragraphs. Why was there unrest? An official at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs explained that one should pay attention to the bullet points in certain places in the paragraphs. Only now did I notice the line.
It was next to blank spots that we had simply thought were large spaces between paragraphs. It’s because we had to check it with the Americans, said the official. He denied that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had been in the process of allowing the Americans to censor the text.
One could well understand the temptation for the hitherto correct official, Kaare Ulbak, who wrote that the US had lied to him. However, he was still sufficiently of an official to use the term “incorrect information.” His criticism was unusually harsh, stating, for example, that the Danish Health Authority had received incorrect information at a meeting with the American authorities in Washington in August 1988. This incorrect information formed the basis for information provided to the government, the Folketing, and the Danish population. The Danish Health Authority finds this unacceptable. Against this background, the Danish Health Authority finds that the US authorities have a problem to explain and that the Danish authorities should officially contact the US government about this. It was not surprising that the text had been deleted by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. No one in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could have a career if they messed with the Americans, and this had to be considered one of the harshest criticisms ever made.
In short, he had discovered that there was not 3, but 6 kilograms of plutonium in the bombs. Furthermore, a document showed that in 1968 the Americans were searching for a missing object on the seabed. They did not manage to find what they were looking for. “It was further speculated that the missing XXXX, in view of its ballistic characteristics, may have come to rest beyond the observed concentration of heavy debris.”
It is clear that this response in 1995 gave new fuel to my old hypothesis that the Americans could have forgotten a bomb on the seabed.
I asked Foreign Minister Helveg Petersen what he would do, and he reluctantly promised to ask the Americans. The Ministry of Health was tasked with drafting a letter that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs could send to the Americans. It illustrates perfectly the power relationship between a small country and a superpower. It should be remembered
that the starting point was that the Danish investigation leader had said that the Americans had lied to him and that the Americans had lost a missing object on Danish Greenland territory. Throughout the years, there has been good and positive cooperation between the Danish and American authorities in this case.
This will certainly also be the case in connection with the attached questions, which have arisen as a result of an apparent discrepancy between our previous knowledge and the information in the now released documents. The American response was distinctly self-assured. The key paragraphs begin almost like the script for a John Wayne film. American Air Force soldiers searched 30 square miles shoulder to shoulder for wreckage.
The response stated that weapon parts could have fallen through the ice, but that none were ever found. However, the Americans acted as if the Danes had never asked what they were actually looking for. This revealed an impressive arrogance. They could have simply released the disputed document without redactions about the missing object.
In short, the response was completely meaningless, but Health Minister Yvonne Herlev Andersen was not to be swayed: “I must refer you to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but you will not get anything out of them. And that comes from the highest level of government.” At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, things went as expected. Niels Helveg Petersen referred to the Ministry of Health.
It was not only civil servants who were afraid of antagonizing the Americans for the sake of their careers. The power of the United States was both frightening and fascinating. It was like observing the relationship between ancient Rome and a vassal state. The American ambassador was not exactly happy about the mention of his country.
When I tried to get a comment from him about the missing bomb, strange noises came out of the phone at first. Then it became understandable. Is this the thanks we get for saving you during World War II? Then it got worse and worse, even though I tried to talk about the Anglo-Saxon press tradition, which made openness necessary, etc.
But the ambassador was clearly angry with our small nation. For example, when I ask Denmark to send four police officers to Haiti for a UN mission led by the US, there is a terrible fuss. You can’t even find four police officers.
He was very upset that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs left him waiting when he arrived unannounced. It was impossible to get through to the ambassador with good arguments. He had to be challenged. Back in 1995, the US had not yet sent troops to the Balkans, so I tried that argument.
But Mr. Ambassador, if nothing else, Denmark has soldiers in Bosnia, doesn’t it? The US does not. The ambassador pondered this for a moment on the other end of the line. Then he replied. That may be true, but the US has more aircraft flying over Bosnia every day than there are in the entire Danish Air Force.
Such an exchange of views may seem childish, but that was what was needed. We are now on speaking terms, and the next day an invitation arrived. A visit to the American ambassador is an honor. If you compare it to the world of music, he would be a rock star.
Since the US had, for a number of years, if not definitively, then at least exercised a strong influence on Danish foreign policy, the ambassador was not a man to be offended in the political establishment. Edward Elson had been appointed ambassador to Denmark because he had donated $1 million to President Clinton’s election campaign.
His primary residence was a castle in Atlanta, originally built by a president of Coca-Cola as an exact replica of Hewer Castle, which Henry VIII had built for one of his wives, Anne Boleyn. Berlingske Tidende assessed him in almost royal terms.
Our personal impression of Mr. Elson was that he was lively, enthusiastic, open, and informal, with a well-developed sense of humor and totally convinced that he could “do a good job.” Politiken described him as the aristocratic, friendly and welcoming Ambassador Elson, who spoke with the newspaper’s staff while the logs crackled in the Tudor fireplace.
The American Embassy is located on Dag Hammerskjolds Allé in Copenhagen. It is the only embassy that has guards patrolling the sidewalk, where guests are asked to explain their business before they are allowed to enter the front door. This may be necessary to deter terrorists, but it is also a show of power.
The ambassador turned out to be unusually small and slight as he showed me to a table covered with open-faced sandwiches. He explained that he had had a large part of the Danish elite there for talks. I noticed that this also included trade unionists.
However, the ambassador quickly gave me a little lesson in what Denmark historically owes the United States. How many Danes fought on the Allied side during World War II? I think it was eight. That’s possible, Mr. Ambassador. I don’t remember the number, but one might have wished there were more.
The ambassador went on to talk about the many American soldiers who had given their lives for Denmark’s freedom. This included everything from the large cemeteries in Luxembourg to an American pilot who was commemorated on Bornholm. His parents would never have the opportunity to see his grave, but he gave his life to liberate you.
After several examples, Elson summed up. If we had not liberated you, you would either be living under an emperor or under Stalin. He then continued his historical lesson with more recent examples of Danish foolishness under the footnote policy. And then the ambassador became angry again about the Haiti issue. Let us elaborate on the Haiti issue. It is also Americans who are offering to resolve it.
We are only asking for four Danish police officers. But when I went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, they said they did not have time to receive me. So I banged on the table and said, “Listen, how many times have I come here personally?” Then they understood, and I got a promise for the four police officers.
We now approached the Thule case and discussed the letter the Americans had sent in response to the Danish inquiry regarding the missing object. The Americans had not responded to anything, and yet Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen had written a strange description in which he almost thanked the Americans for always providing all the information.
The ambassador explained that he had put pressure on Niels Helveg Petersen. “I remember that strange text well. Now I understand it better, if it was you who twisted Helveg’s arm.” The ambassador did not comment further, but smiled and sipped his wine. Then he summed up the relationship between our two countries. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.
I myself am a great admirer of the efforts of the United States and England during World War II. So much so that I often spend my free time reading new works about this unique and encouraging period in world history, when good so clearly triumphed over evil.
But it seemed to me that the ambassador was exaggerating the moral obligation if he believed that a small country, out of gratitude and guilt, even 60 years after the end of the war, should not question the United States’ later policies. Before we moved on, however, the ambassador also had a story about his power over careers in the Danish administration.
He had been at a reception at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs where a young civil servant had had too much to drink and came up to him. The young man asked the ambassador how it could be that the Americans did not have soldiers in Bosnia when they had had so many in Vietnam.
Ambassador Elson looked at him angrily and said, “Young man, you are way out of line. If you don’t leave immediately, I will make sure you don’t have a job tomorrow.”
One couldn’t help but wonder if this was a figurative warning, since I myself had mentioned the absence of American soldiers in Bosnia. But I decided to just take it as a good story.
The ambassador became quite sad when he talked about his disappointment at seeing Denmark support French proposals to impose quotas on American films. What is this, rationing culture? We are the rich uncle that everyone loves to hate. I try to explain that Hollywood’s worldview has become the world’s worldview. We have all grown up with the Western hero riding off into the sunset across the prairie, while we hardly ever see a French, Spanish, or German film. However, the ambassador’s mixture of excitement and sadness was so strong that I had to go to extremes and explain how my old mother had loved Spencer Tracy.
Precisely because he symbolized a quiet American common sense and generosity. And that my family came from a poor part of West Jutland, where some of the best had emigrated to the United States. Yes, we actually felt that part of the United States was our heritage.
We had to try to make the ambassador understand that critical interest in America’s presence in Greenland did not necessarily stem from malice. Perhaps it would be possible to open his eyes if we presented him with the opposite situation. It would be pointless for me to construct an example involving our own small country.
But the French had both nuclear weapons and sufficient arrogance. Mr. Ambassador, could you imagine what the US would say if France dropped a couple of nuclear bombs off the US coast and then said, “Bring it on”? Imagine if the French said they would give the US all the necessary information about the accident, except for information that conflicted with France’s security interests. Would the US accept that? No, that would be completely unthinkable. The ambassador avoided commenting on the comparison.
But one must understand that a Dane cannot live with the fact that there is something secret on Danish territory that a foreign power will not disclose. It is simply a matter of honor, just as they mentioned that one should not bite the hand that feeds you.
No, it’s like the cowboy movie and the hero riding off into the sunset that we talked about before. You trust your friends. Danes must learn to trust us Americans. You must trust us.
The conversation may seem a little exotic when recounted in a sober and dispassionate manner, but it was conducted in all seriousness, since it was essentially about power. The ambassador maintained that there was no bomb at the bottom, and he refused to allow the crossings-out in the paper referring to an ‘object of a ballistic nature’ to be deleted.
It was exciting to talk to the ambassador because, as a representative of the superpower, he exuded power. But to be honest, I think my arguments fell on deaf ears. For Elsen, Europe was a wonderful place, but only if Europeans knew their place. Europeans were not in the same league as Americans.
The American archives.
Power is about insight and information. But it is also a question of money. When I first went to the US to find information, I did so at my own expense. The regional radio station in Aarhus naturally did not have the funds for research abroad. I understood that perfectly well, so I approached the New York Times to propose a collaboration.
The venerable newspaper fills every journalist with awe, and I tried to make the most of an audience with two of the editors. The thin and well-balanced one was very friendly, while the fat one was aggressive towards the journalist from a local radio station in a distant country.
In the end, the thin one won the fight, and I was offered a trip to Washington to talk to the newspaper’s defense correspondent. However, he was busy with something else for the next few days.
I did a simple calculation that gave me goose bumps at the thought of my depleted overdraft, which would grow and grow while I sat and flourished in a hotel in Washington. So I ended up having to decline the offer. Instead, I started looking at the US state archives, which were a pleasant surprise.
While the Danish archives are designed to prevent citizens from gaining insight into the actions of politicians, the American archives are designed to give citizens insight. This is a consequence of the American Revolution and the War of Independence, where the evil King George was defeated and emphasis was placed on the rights of the individual citizen.
In Denmark, on the other hand, we continued the traditions of absolute monarchy in this area after the Constitution of 1849. It was thus in the American archives that one could see with what wonderful matter-of-factness the Americans considered buying Greenland after the war. A prominent businessman even suggested conducting nuclear tests there and received an understanding letter from a high-ranking official.
However, Denmark was not without its own trading talent. The archives show that we had offered the Americans base rights after the war if they would accept between 8,000 and 15,000 German refugees in the American occupation zone in Germany. However, there was one particular telegram that surprised me especially because it was so unpleasant.
It showed that the guardians of democracy were prepared to trample democracy underfoot for the sake of the Western world’s defense of democracy. It was written after the disaster on the night of January 21, 1968, when the American hydrogen bomb aircraft crashed on the sea ice from Thule Air Base. The American ambassador, Catherine E. White, was awakened by phone calls at her magnificent villa in Hellerup.
Air attaché Ridley Kemp had gone to the embassy at Dag Hammerskjolds Allé 24 at the end of the lakes in Østerbro in Copenhagen and tried to get things under control. One of the first things he did was to immediately requisition a plane from the US Air Force center in Wiesbaden, Germany, in case the ambassador needed it.
Then, in collaboration with Ambassador Katharine E. White, he wrote the first report to the US, in which he raised the possibility of keeping the accident secret until the parliamentary elections in Denmark were over. Perhaps Prime Minister Kragh will postpone the announcement for as long as possible to avoid any unfortunate influence on tomorrow’s parliamentary elections.
The pilot
I decided to track down some of those involved. The pilot of the B-52 bomber, John Hauk, now lived in the southeastern United States, and he confirmed that both crew members and family had been sworn to secrecy. We were all instructed that the matter must not be disclosed for the sake of the Danish election.
However, the navigator had children who attended a private school. The children were informed, and the matter came to the attention of the school principal. He decided that it was a good way to generate publicity for the school, so he called the AP news agency, which broke the story.
The pilot’s report was interesting, but also sad, because it confirmed that our democracies had considered using methods that belonged in the political universe of the Soviet Union. John Hawk had been a central part of the American nuclear weapons preparedness, which was essential to the United States’ position as a superpower. America had missiles, but they could be taken by surprise by an unexpected Soviet attack.
That is why B-52 aircraft were on standby 24 hours a day with hydrogen bombs on board, ready to be directed towards the Soviet Union at a moment’s notice. Now I met a small man in a short-sleeved shirt who, standing among cactus plants, told me his thoughts if he had had to drop the bombs. I am religious, yes, but I never thought specifically about the bombs in that context.
They could destroy an entire city instead of what normal bombs can destroy. But I never thought about them in particular. I asked him several times about this central theme, but Haug convinced me that he really would have dropped them without the slightest hesitation.
He even emphasized that he had applied to be a bomber pilot instead of a fighter pilot because “it was more fun.” When I visited him at home, I couldn’t help noticing that it was his wife who wore the pants.
He didn’t mind commenting on the paradox that, like a god, he could have ended the lives of 100,000 people, while his wife wore the pants. When it comes to war, it’s different. I’m a hawk.
Our attitude at the time was that we were angry with the government because it wasn’t doing enough in Vietnam, but you can’t wage war with your hands tied behind your back. It’s the same in Korea. We should have dropped an atomic bomb when the Chinese entered the war. That would have stopped them.
In 1968, John Haug’s wife had found it difficult to understand why there was no mention of the accident on television for the first few hours. The man who had been assigned to prevent this was Phil Goulding. The man who had been assigned to prevent this was Phil Goulding, the Pentagon’s press secretary.
He received the call about the accident on one of the two tap-proof gray telephones in his home. He immediately contacted the US State Department. The State Department said that the Danes would probably be even more upset about such a nuclear accident than the Spaniards had been two years earlier, because the Danes were so ‘nuclear nervous’. Not least because Denmark was facing a general election in which Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag’s fate was at stake. Goulding then called Colonel Helmann Tholer, who was sitting in his newly furnished apartment, looking forward to enjoying a quiet dinner with his 16-year-old daughter, with whom he had been left alone after the death of her mother.
Helmann Tholer’s job description was almost that of a special envoy for the president or the Pentagon. His last major assignment had been to handle public relations during the riots in Chicago in August 1967. Later, he was to take care of the press side of President Johnson’s summits.
It’s Phil Golding who has crashed a B-52 at Thule Air Base in Greenland. You have to leave immediately. I can’t. I’m about to eat. There’s a plane ready at Edwards. It’ll be easier in 45 minutes. I can’t. It takes 45 minutes just to drive out there. Then leave right away.
When Hellmann Tholer got there, the plane was indeed ready. It was loaded with supplies for Thule, and sitting up front was a nurse who was also going there. At the same time, telexes were sent from the US to the American commander at Thule, who had received no fewer than six by the time the plane landed.
The commander rushed over to Hellman Tholer and said, “I understand. You have full authority to make a statement. I understand. Have I done something wrong? Have you already complained or what?” Helman Tholer began preparations, which included briefing the pilot, who was instructed to later maintain that he had not flown over Danish territory with nuclear weapons. It had simply been a failed emergency landing.
When the Danish and foreign press finally arrived at Thule, John Haug and the rest of the surviving crew were presented, and they stuck to the rehearsed story. It was fascinating to meet some of these people on home turf. Pilot John Hawke, who had never given much thought to the political implications of his job.
Phil Golding had apparently had some sort of nervous breakdown because of US policy during the Vietnam War. And Colonel Helmann Tholer, who, surprisingly, was the most fun and interesting to talk to, even though he was a bit of a brash action man. What was the difference, if you were to compare them to Danish civil servants and officers?
The difference could probably be summed up in the expression “All the world was their playing field.” They really did have the whole world at their disposal. South America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe—nothing was foreign to them. They could travel anywhere and encounter American bases or American outposts that resembled their homeland. They had no doubt about the US’s right to rule the world.
Danish officials looked cautiously over their shoulders so as not to offend the superpower, while Denmark was a minor detail in a major game for America’s own officials.
The secret agreement.
I spoke to a large number of people, all of whom denied that there were any secret agreements.
Except for one person, who spoke so cryptically that it was impossible to use publicly. That person was John Letty, who had been Deputy Secretary of State at the time of the accident in 1968.
Yes, Mr. Brink, I don’t remember much about it, but it seems to me that the Prime Minister did not want the matter to come to light because there was a secret agreement between us that we could fly over, and he did not want that to come to light, as I remember it, but it is not entirely clear to me, he said on the phone.
He then played on his age and alleged frailty and would not agree to my visiting him the next day. The next day, he was even more vague about a possible agreement. If there had been one at all, it could have been either verbal or written.
It was not easy to determine whether the man was senile and confused Denmark with one of the countless other countries with which the US had agreements, or whether he was deliberately teasing the journalist by dangling a scandal in front of him in such a vague form that he knew it could not be made public.
The archives in Denmark and the US were closed in this key area. Chief Archivist Otto Scheppelern at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs informed me that I would not be able to obtain a single piece of paper on the Thule case. There was not much else to do but wait, if any secret political documents existed at all. Help came from an unexpected source.
One day, I received a call from Mario Schmidt, chairman of the Thule workers, who was in Washington and wanted to be interviewed. He had found secret documents in the archives. What is it, Mario? Well, it’s about how they wanted to delay the release of information about the accident until after the elections in Denmark were over. Is it the telegram saying that the Americans thought Krag wanted it that way?
Yes, you could say that. But there’s more. We’ve found a couple of kilos of papers. What do they show? Well, we have to go through them first. But it’s a scandal. It didn’t sound like the ever-combative Mario Schmidt had found anything new.
But on the other hand, the initiative showed that ordinary people could find more in the archives in the US than the Danish government could in Denmark. So I asked Frank Esmann to do an interview and send it home via satellite. That was just what was needed.
The top officials at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were so concerned about what the two kilograms of unspecified papers might contain that they sent a man to the basement to check what they themselves had. The official in question found the scandalous document, which showed that Prime Minister H.C. Hansen had made a secret nuclear policy with the Americans, and that Prime Minister Jens Otto Krag had known about it. And Prime Minister Paul Hartling. As well as some centrally placed officials. The next day, a meeting was arranged between Foreign Minister Niels Helveg Petersen and Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen. One would think that the Danish government would immediately contact the Folketing and the Danish and Greenlandic people, but no. They kept the matter secret and instead sent the director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Henrik Wölk, to the United States.
One would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when he was granted an audience: “Excuse me, but we have discovered that we and you have a secret nuclear policy together, which we ourselves were not aware of.”
It took over a year before the government deemed it appropriate to inform the Danish people. This finally happened on June 29. It is probably not entirely wrong to believe that they had hoped the matter would be forgotten during the summer holidays.
The next day, I had an audience with Niels Helveg Petersen, just as US Secretary of Defense William Perry was about to visit him at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The strange thing was that the government had not presented the secret agreement itself. They had only said that it existed. But Helveg was not inclined to release the papers.
And then there is an exchange here where Brink says:
“When will you release it?”
Helveg:
“Well, it’s not something I release. There is legislation governing that.”
Brink:
“Is it 50 years?”
Helveg:
“60, I think.”
There was no legal requirement that the papers had to be kept secret for that long. It was a way of evading responsibility. Another thing was even more peculiar and showed the completely exaggerated subservience of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs towards the Americans. During a whole year of negotiations, they managed to avoid asking the Americans whether they had made use of the agreement.
Brink:
“Have nuclear weapons been stored in Greenland?”
Helveg:
“I don’t know.”
Brink:
“You don’t know?”
Helveg:
“No.”
Brink:
“You’re the Danish foreign minister!”
Helveg:
“I know that there have been flights with nuclear weapons on board.”
Helveg made flying motions with his finger in the air in front of him. “That much is clear. But whether they have been stored in Greenland, I do not know.”
Brink:
“Won’t you ask the Americans about that? You were supposed to meet with the Secretary of Defense now.”
Helveg:
“What is important in this context is to make it clear in Danish politics that no overflights or storage took place, that it was not true.”
Helveg cut through the air in front of him with his flat hand like a knife to mark a boundary.
“The Danish public has a right to know this, and that is what has happened with the report. There are a number of details that are difficult to go into.”
Brink:
“Yes, but there is no detail about what has been stored.”
Helveg:
“Yes, but I don’t know. I have to say that.”
Brink:
“No, but would you like to ask about it?”
Helveg:
“Yes, but there are no deliveries today. Whether there have been any, I don’t know.”
Brink:
“Would you like to ask about it?”
Helveg:
“No, I think the matter has been fully clarified. The statement that has been issued here has been agreed in every detail with the American authorities. And in any case, there are no stockpiles today, and there haven’t been any since 1968.”
Brink:
“Am I to understand that there has been storage in the past?”
Helveg: “I don’t know.”
He leaned forward and looked insistent.
Brink: “But why don’t you ask Perry about it? You’re going to meet him now, aren’t you?”
Helveg: “Yes, but I have other important matters to discuss than history.”
Brink: “Is it so as not to offend the Americans?”
Helveg: “Not at all. We have had good cooperation with the Americans in this case.”
On the other side of the harbor base, a number of limousines, police cars, and motorcycles were now waiting. The Danish foreign minister hurried over, and I wondered how on earth a radical minister had managed to avoid asking such fundamental questions.
However, my friendly questioning had paid off, because it later turned out that our foreign minister had plucked up the courage to ask the American defense secretary the impertinent questions. At a press conference a few days later, the leader of Greenland, Lars Emil Johansen, came to Copenhagen to meet with Foreign Minister Helveg Petersen and Prime Minister Poul Nyrup Rasmussen.
It was boiling hot at the press conference, but Helveg hunched over as if he had a big fish in his basket.
Helveg:
“The question has been raised as to whether the Americans took advantage of the permission to station nuclear weapons in Greenland.”
Helveg made several small statements to delay answering his own question.
Helveg:
“During the visit of US Secretary of Defense Parris the other day, I had the opportunity to ask him whether the Americans actually made use of the permission, and they have now investigated this.”
Helveg was so good at creating suspense that even the press photographers stood still to listen.
“I am happy to say that they did not.”
The Americans had now had the opportunity to look through their archives, and there were no nuclear weapons in Greenland. I sat there feeling relieved on behalf of the minister and the nation, but God help him if it’s a lie, I thought. It was.
Later that summer, Helwig had to come clean and announce that, after renewed contact with the US, it had been discovered that the Americans had had nuclear weapons at Thule Air Base between 1959 and 1965. There had been 48 small nuclear weapons as part of an air defense system, as well as four larger nuclear bombs for a shorter period.
H.C. Hansen’s letter to the Americans.
As mentioned, I wanted to see H.C. Hansen’s letter to the Americans. This should have been easy, given that the government constantly talked about openness. But it turned out to be quite difficult. I first requested to see it under the Freedom of Information Act, but Helveg Petersen refused to hand it over, stating that I should apply under the Archives Act.
It sounded far-fetched, and it was. But it concealed a well-thought-out power play. Under the Archives Act, the foreign minister could claim that the document was no longer in the Foreign Ministry, but had been moved to the National Archives next to the Folketing on the other side of Knippelsbro. And the National Archivist could be blamed for not wanting to hand it over.
This led to some Kafkaesque power struggles between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the National Archivist, Johan Peter Noack, who had started his career by championing openness. Since the document had not actually been sent to him, he did not want to end up taking the blame in the eyes of the public.
Viewers got involved because I described the grotesque situation in a series of reports under the motto: “Does Denmark’s history belong to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or the people?” A sweet and strict senior woman at the National Archives explained to viewers that you could only request the documents if you knew their registration number.
And since the papers had probably never been registered, it could take years just to determine whether they even existed. It was a Kafkaesque demonstration of bureaucratic abuse of power. My tactic of smoking out the papers paid off. National Archivist Johan Peter Noack called the Foreign Ministry’s chief archivist, Otto Scheppelern, and believed him.
If Scheppelern did not send the papers over immediately, Noack would have to tell Brink that the papers were not in the National Archives. However, he declared himself willing to save the Ministry of Foreign Affairs from this predicament by having the papers brought over immediately.
Otto Scheppelern was a stubborn man who, four years earlier, had written that I could not be given a single piece of paper about the Thule case. He stood his ground, so the National Archivist now called the Director of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Henrik Wölk, who was in a meeting with a group of ambassadors. The pressure worked, but the Ministry of Foreign Affairs still tried to prevent publication.
Helveg Petersen’s secretary, Liselotte Simonsen, called me and said that Chief Archivist Scheppelern had now decided that I could have access to the papers. However, the chief archivist asks me to emphasize that this is subject to the provisions of the Criminal Code, she said. This threat refers to the completely unenforceable Archives Act, which even under the absolute monarchy must have been astonishing, if it had existed at the time.
It was not permitted to obtain a copy of the documents to which one had access. Nor was it permitted to transcribe them, at least not in their entirety, and what was reproduced had to be reproduced in a distorted form. I interviewed the director of the ministry, Henrik Wölk, about this peculiar situation.
He sat in front of the red coat of arms with the three lions and the royal crown, and his way of thinking suited this backdrop perfectly. I tried to get a clear answer as to how much of the documents could actually be published.
The TV news cannot show the papers, but you are allowed to take notes from these papers, form your own impression of what they say, and, of course, explain that impression in your own words. So where is the line?
So if you can manage to transcribe the entire document, for example, do I also have the right to do so? Or would that be crossing the line? I would think so. It would be equivalent to photocopying it in the old-fashioned way. But it is difficult to say where the line is.
Shortly before, Foreign Minister Helveg Petersen had issued press releases about his policy of openness in this matter and his liberal attitude towards people who wanted to access the material.
I asked Director Wölk if we had misunderstood the whole thing. I’m afraid someone has misunderstood what has been said.
After some further wrangling, I was given access to the material, and there lay H.C. Hansen’s secret letter under the vaults of the National Archives. It looked worn, as if it had passed through many hands. H.C. Hansen and Jens Otto Krag had known about it. But Hartling and the later ministers said they had never seen it.
The incredible thing was that it had been in the Foreign Ministry’s archives all those years, while successive governments had run election campaigns on “No to nuclear weapons.” How on earth could it have disappeared? All the new heads of government were presented with the most important and secret documents.
What was inside was the truth, and I was able to read the full text to the public on the TV news 38 years after H.C. Hansen had written the words. The folder contained more interesting information. Among other things, Danish officials had agreed with the Americans on how to justify a possible nuclear accident at Thule. This made the leader of the Greenlandic Home Rule Government, Lars Emil Johansen, furious.
It is an expression and proof of the most unsympathetic part of the Danish civil service that has been in Greenland. Now, it is a little unclear whether we were even allowed to publish this document for you, even though you are the chairman of the Greenland Home Rule Government. What do you say to that? It is completely unheard of.
I mean, where in the world do you find people being exposed to risks on the basis of agreements made on their behalf by two completely different governments? And then 40 years later, they are still being kept in the dark. Even 40 years later, they are still being kept in the dark. It is a stain on the Danish Realm, and we must remove it as soon as possible.
I also read the documents that showed how the Americans had, with some justification, pressured the Danish government after the hydrogen bomb accident in 1968. The Danish government was not to make provocative statements to the press when it had such a secret nuclear agreement with the US. The US simply dictated to Denmark what to say about the accident. That was power.
And it was Deputy Foreign Minister Letty who, at one point, had whispered to me on the phone about a secret agreement that had executed the order.
In 1968, he summoned the Danish ambassador, Torben Rønne, who was read the riot act, even though he dared to protest that Denmark should be gagged about an accident for which the US bore full responsibility. A few months later, I went to the US to interview some of the key figures.
John Letty was now willing to participate, provided he could first review the new documents. I faxed them to him so that he could get his participation approved by the US State Department. When I arrived in the US, however, he had become nervous and did not want to participate after all. I took it as the whims of an old man.
Police charges
Back home, there was an envelope waiting for me, informing me that I had been charged by the police.
The US State Department had contacted the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which in turn had asked the National Archivist, Johan Peter Noack, to file a police report because I had sent the documents in question to John Letty several months after they had been published and thoroughly discussed in Denmark. At first, I thought it was a practical joke played by one of my humorous colleagues.
How could it be legal to publish something for millions of Danes, but not send it to one American? Surely it couldn’t be true that the Danish government was dancing to the tune of the US government to such an extent. However, it turned out to be true.
Niels Helveg Petersen expressed himself with great seriousness:
“We received a request from the American government stating that it had discovered leaks, and it was on that basis that we contacted the National Archives.”
I had to watch myself as the main story on my own TV news program, which reported in the headlines that I had been charged under a section of the law that could result in six months in prison. One had to admit that the Americans had power. The case was both grotesque and a little serious, because Helveg Petersen and National Archivist Johan Peter Noack tried to give the public the impression that the papers I had sent to the US were not the same as those I had previously published in Denmark. Fortunately, I got hold of the National Archivist’s life insurance policy.
It was a paper he had previously written about the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ attempt to deceive him. I benefited greatly from the information in this life insurance policy when I later met with a couple of lawyers for questioning by the police, who then had to re-question Foreign Minister Henrik Wölk and Johan Peter Noack.
Chief Archivist Scheppelern prepared a four-page memo for the police in which he explained that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had not been aware that these were the same documents that had been shown on TV. Prime Minister Poul Nørup Rasmussen became involved and declared in the Folketing that it was a mistake for the National Archives to have granted access to the documents.
As the National Archives fell under the jurisdiction of Minister of Culture Jytte Hilden, she was furious about the press coverage and apparently felt that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had undermined her. I find it unfortunate that a series of events that was essentially a misunderstanding between two authorities subsequently resulted in one authority being made a scapegoat, she wrote in an internal letter to the Minister of the Interior.
The lawsuit fell apart. Of course, I enjoyed uncovering the internal squabbles, but the undisguised willingness of politicians and civil servants to use their power gave me pause for thought. How would a citizen without journalistic training have fared?
However, there was a twist to the story, as I was told that Ambassador Edward Elson, after receiving the letter from the US State Department, had thoroughly reprimanded the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs and demanded action. At the same time, he instructed his press secretary to tell the press that the US had not requested that Poul be reported to the police.
Then another invitation arrived for the embassy’s annual Fourth of July party. I declined the invitation in a letter written in Danish because I did not consider the ambassador to be a gentleman on that basis. I later learned that the letter had caused quite a stir at the embassy, where Ambassador Elson had a reputation for being extremely hot-tempered and accustomed to Danes groveling before him.
Contempt for democracy
The entire existence of the Thule Base was about defending the free world. That is why it was so sad that a traditional, solid, seemingly honest, social democratic leader like H.C. Hansen chose to lie about it and that at least some of his successors followed suit. Unfortunately, however, this is a political disease in Denmark that probably arose with the defeat in 1864. We did not want to participate in World War I, but we profited greatly from it.
During World War II, the established Denmark pursued a policy of collaboration, while a very small group of losers and resistance fighters had to ensure that we were barely recognized as allies. This hypocrisy in our foreign policy continues in our EU policy, where politicians today suffer from the fact that for many years cooperation was presented solely as an economic phenomenon.
There is an almost Hamlet-like duality in our leading politicians’ approach to foreign policy, which was expressed in a comical way in the days when H.C. Hansen’s letter came to light.
While politicians tried to reveal as little as possible about Denmark’s secret nuclear policy, they made solemn speeches against France’s nuclear tests, and Prime Minister Nyrup Rasmussen forbade a section of the Life Guard Orchestra from accompanying the Queen there. The French should feel who had justice on their side.
The sick Thule workers continued to claim that their illness was caused by cleaning up after the hydrogen bomb accident. The state launched several investigations, and we were able to reveal, among other things, confusion in the records of the number of deaths and falsification of an autopsy report. Finally, the prime minister settled the matter once and for all with a huge hearing in the circus building in Copenhagen. The result was that it could not be proven that the workers’ illness had anything to do with the accident. But they and some Greenlandic prisoners were paid a sum that is probably the largest Danish compensation ever.
But perhaps what made the biggest impression during 10 years of work was the forced relocation of the Greenlanders from the Thule Air Base area. In order to make room for an expansion, the inspector and the priest were put on an American military plane in 1953 and flown to Copenhagen. When they returned, they told the Greenlandic population that they had four days to leave the place and move north. When I visited Qanak, the new Thule, myself.
I couldn’t help but notice the many Danish flags in the living rooms. There were Danish flags on the shelves, small Danish flags on the tablecloths, and Danish flags woven into the cushions. It is impossible to imagine more loyal Danish citizens than the elderly people in this town. Yet the memory of the forced relocation remained a thorn in their hearts.
Sofie Eibe looked away as she told me: “If we didn’t move within four days, our houses would be razed to the ground by bulldozers. They treated us like slaves.”
The old cattle farmer, Marcin Guac Jensen, said: “When I think back on the move, we were pushed out like dogs. Get out. Go away.”
This perception of events was miles away from what was recorded in a report led by District Court Judge Svend Sigler, who had several years to investigate the case. I sought out Svend Sigler in the palatial building of the Eastern High Court, a stone’s throw from Amalienborg Palace. There were no Danish flags here, but instead a state-authorized PH lamp on the table and legal literature on the shelves.
Sigler’s commission had concluded that the move demanded by the priest and the inspector within four days was an offer to the residents. They had an offer, and I don’t think there is any basis for saying that the Greenlanders could not have been forced back to the site.
Or could not have been forced to remain in place. There is no evidence that anything should have been enforced. There was no police presence. There were no other means of coercion. The Americans were not asked to evict them. It was astonishing.
The Danish authorities asked the Greenlanders on the small peninsula to move within four days, otherwise their houses would be razed to the ground by bulldozers. A few hundred meters away was one of the world’s largest military bases. Wasn’t that coercion? What would you call it if a Danish village were subjected to something similar?
If it is true that democracy must always be measured by how it protects the weakest, then an injustice was committed here, but it was done so that the great game of democracy could be won. However, it could well have been won with open cards and proper methods. H.C. Hansen’s secret letter and the secret nuclear policy are good examples of how Danish leaders are willing to use power in the big game. But it should preferably be done discreetly or completely covertly.
Some have argued that it is naive to demand ideals in foreign policy and that it was perfectly acceptable for a Danish prime minister to campaign against nuclear weapons while secretly allowing the US to place nuclear weapons on Danish territory. Therefore, I would like to conclude with a poem that H.C. Hansen himself wrote when he was a young man.
It goes like this:
“He is elected, he becomes great and gains power like a god. He is at odds with the happy and satisfied. He readily accepts compromises, which, at his behest, must immediately be understood as the only right thing to do.
And in the moldy and stinking depths of the dustbin, you can see his quotes at the bottom. They were pretty when the excitement of election day carried him forward, but now they are basically empty.”
That was the entire section, written by Poul Brink, born in 1953, trained as a journalist in 1979, after an internship at Danmarks Radio and New Day at Lolland Falster. In 1979, he joined Østjyllands Radio, Danmarks Radio. Here, he began an in-depth investigation of the American Thule base in Greenland. In 1987, he was hired by the TV news program’s Aarhus editorial office. In 1992, he moved to the main editorial office in Copenhagen, covering environmental issues, genetic engineering, cloning, etc. Moved to the foreign desk and since 1996 has mainly covered the UK, with a focus on Tony Blair’s influence on political life. Continued TV coverage of the Thule base, awarded the Kavling Prize for this coverage in 1997.
After the US government contacted the Danish government, the police charged him with publishing classified material in the US that had previously been published in Denmark. The charges were later dropped. Most recently, he has covered the war in Afghanistan for Danmarks Radio. Please refer to Magtens Bog, the letter from Hansen.
And, as I said, this is my reading of this talented journalist Paul Brink from Magtens Bog. The section I read is called “The Bomb That Disappeared” with the subtitle “Thule Air Base in Greenland.”
And what I find interesting to note here is that there is one thing that Poul Brink does not suspect at all. And that is probably because he has not taken an interest in the Constitution. But it is the Queen’s formal power.
So he believes that it is Poul Nyrup Rasmussen who decides that the Life Guard cannot accompany the Queen on this trip to France. And it’s also a bit funny when the army is subordinate to the royal family. It is, according to the Constitution. But Paul Brink doesn’t have, how shall we say, the imagination for that.
But on the other hand, he does have, well... It’s crazy that he reveals how the Danish government is just a puppet government, and the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a puppet ministry for the US when it comes to international politics, even when international politics takes place on Danish Greenlandic soil.
It also gives pause for thought in relation to the agreement that Denmark is about to enter into with the US, allowing the Americans to establish US military bases at Skrydstrup Air Base, Karup Air Base, and Aalborg Air Base. However, they are not allowed to have certain types of weapons. But as we can see and hear here, such things can be circumvented.
It has certainly happened before in history. So there is no guarantee that the Americans will not bring cluster bombs and nuclear bombs to Denmark, for example. I would say that this remains completely uncertain. And with that, I will conclude this reading and my commentary on the reading.
Below is a link to the original podcast I made back in 2024. It is in the Danish language.
