During the 1970s, the Soviet KGB attempted to recruit Jens Stoltenberg
Soviet intelligence once tried to recruit the Secretary General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Jens Stoltenberg, to the Committee for the State Security of the Soviet Union, or the KGB. Stoltenberg wrote this in his autobiography, NRK reported. Stoltenberg explained that he had been in contact with employees of the Soviet Embassy since the late 1970s and repeatedly talked with Soviet Cultural Attaché Boris Kirillov.
The Secretary General of NATO recalls how he met with the erudite interlocutor, Boris Kirillov, in the restaurant of national cuisine at Stortorget square where they ate shrimp sandwiches and discussed politics. Stoltenberg knew that Kirillov served in the KGB. Eventually, it was discovered that the embassy employee was a spy and his main mission was to recruit Norwegian politicians.
“Later, it was revealed that I was tagged and given a code name. I was Steklov,” Stoltenberg wrote in his autobiography. This was the common practice for people who were expected to be confidential contacts for the KGB. In the 1990s, Stoltenberg reported his contacts with Kirillov to the Ministry of Defense and the Police Intelligence Service.
Security forces asked Stoltenberg to meet with Kirillov in order to understand whether he wanted to abandon service in the KGB. “If I saw such signal, I would have to say that Norway is a safe country and it will take care of him. I felt like a character in a spy novel during the implementation of this task. However, the attempt failed,” Stoltenberg wrote, noting that it was the last time he saw Kirillov.