Danish Commission absolves secret services of Cold War violations

Leif Aamand

By IAN ALLEN | intelNews.org |
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. In 1999, the Danish government set up the Police Intelligence Service (PET) Commission to review PET’s practice of keeping files on Danish citizens during the Cold War. After ten years, 4,600 pages and $13 million in public funds, the Commission has announced that PET’s activities during the Cold War largely fell within its mandate and that the organization was “never […] a state [with]in a state that acted according to its own norms”. The Commission concluded this despite discovering that PET systematically violated a September 1968 government decree preventing government departments from keeping files on Danish citizens based on their legal political activities. The Commission’s report reveals that the violation was authorized by a secret memorandum from the Danish Ministry of Justice, which allowed PET to continue its political vetting of Danish citizens. As a result, PET amassed detailed files on approximately 300,000 Danes, targeting mostly “Trotskyists, anarchists and left-wing revolutionary groups”, as well as members of Denmark’s Left Socialist Party. Read more of this post