Wenche Behring Breivik died eight days later.
She passed away just before Easter. Her son sought permission to attend her funeral. His application was refused.
He had no contact with his father. Nor with his sister. None of his friends had written to him. Many of his closest friends said they had put him behind them. ‘I’m through with Anders,’ said one. And yet hardly a day passed without them thinking of him. Many of them were troubled by feelings of guilt. Should they have realised?
He had hardly anyone to correspond with any more. In the letters that he did receive, most of the words were blacked out. He replied to them with letters he knew would be censored. The correspondence petered out. The letters stopped coming. His prison cell had not become the writer’s workshop he had planned. Some journalists asked for interviews. He visualised the queue of reporters eager to interview him, dreaming of being the first. But he did not want to meet any of them. If he gave an interview he imagined the queue evaporating, interest tailing off. He would no longer be in demand.
He did respond to one of the interview requests. The request arrived just after the trial He spent a long time thinking about whether to write back. Only a year later, in June 2013, did he decide to answer. The journalist had included a stamped addressed envelope. He located it among his other documents, where he had been keeping it for almost a year. He elected to start on a jovial note.
Dear Åsne! :-)
I have been following your career with great interest since 2003. I both respect and admire you for your mentality, competence and intelligence, which afford you opportunities that almost all women and most men can only dream of ;-)
Flattery was the style he adopted. ‘What’s so unique about you is that you achieved so much at such a young age, and in addition to that are so beautiful! ;-)’ he wrote.
Then he described the strategy he had employed throughout the trial. Double psychology, he called it. Calculated deception, to put it simply. A necessary evil to counter the propaganda and deceit of the other parties. And it was for this reason that the full truth about his operation had not come out. He wrote that ever since the trial he had wanted to be open about everything, but that he had been prevented from expressing himself since the stricter regime was implemented after the verdict.
I understand that among left-wing journalists there is some prestige attached to getting the opportunity to be the first to really put the knife into the ‘worst ultra-nationalist terrorist in the European world since WW2’ and inflict the worst damage, and there are undoubtedly many ‘right-wing extremists’ in Europe who would have been retarded enough to contribute to their own character assassination. In my eyes, people like you are extremely dangerous predators from whom I instinctively want to keep my distance. I know that someone like you will stab deep, and if I were stupid enough to participate you might even be able to stab deeper than Husby/Sørheim and Lippestad. I have no wish to contribute to this, either by meeting you or by clarifying what remains unclarified on any terms but my own. I therefore do not want to have anything to do with your work.
The letter changed tone.
I would like, however, to make you a counter-offer. I have enough insight to realise that ‘The Breivik Diaries’ will be boycotted by the established publishing houses, and therefore want to offer you the chance of selling the book as a package within your project, that is, that you top and/or tail your book with a quick hack job by me, with or without your name on the book, and that you in addition get all the income (the author’s share). So you will gain financially, while those you want to impress will still congratulate you on a great character assassination. I can live with my story coming out in this form, provided that the book is removed from the boycott lists of at least some of the major distributors.
To tie in with the book launch, provided that it is successful, you will be given the opportunity to conduct the first and only interview that I shall give, and you will also get the sales rights to this, enabling you to write another crude character assassination to ‘wash your hands’ of any accusations that may by then have been made that you are a useful idiot etc.
With narcissistic and revolutionary wishes.
Anders Behring Breivik
That was how he signed off.
In a letter the following month, which he opened with the far cooler ‘To Miss Seierstad,’ he wrote that all criticism of him could actually be viewed as a bonus. It was so detached from reality as to give him a valuable advantage, which he wanted to exploit to the full against the propagandists. He was now waiting for the end of the ban on his freedom of speech and took the view that he should have the right to defend himself against all the propaganda now being pumped out. ‘Because the “Character” who is being constructed and peddled by authors and journalists on the left is, after all, a very long way from the truth.’
No interview took place.
The inmate was annoyed at receiving the wrong letters. He only got letters from ‘New Testament Christians and people who do not like me’, he complained.
These were not the sorts of letters he wanted.
He wanted the other letters. The letters that must be piling up in the censor’s office. The letters to the Commander of the Norwegian anti-communist resistance movement. The letters from the people who wanted a signed copy of his book. The letters to Andrew Berwick. The letters to Anders B. Those were the letters he wanted.
But they did not come.
He aimed to set up a prison alliance of militant nationalists with himself at its head. So far, he was the only member. But then, as the civil war spread, as people got swept along, inspired by his manifesto, he would be freed by his brothers.
In the meantime, while he was waiting, his Lacoste jersey was spared. It was safely put away in the prison’s dark storeroom.
All he saw of the real world were the tops of the trees round the prison.
And its white walls.
Epilogue
It was only supposed to be an article for Newsweek.
‘Get me anything you can on that man!’ said Newsweek editor Tina Brown on the phone from New York. It was early on; the terrorist attack had only just hit us. The country was in shock. I was in shock.
I did not find out much about that man in the summer of 2011.
Having written about Norway’s reaction to the attack instead, I put the country behind me, as always, and pursued my original plan for the autumn – covering the continuous uprisings around the Arab world. My next stop was Tripoli in Libya. While Norway was grieving, I went back to the Middle East.
Then the date was set for the trial. Newsweek asked me to write one more story when the court case against Anders Behring Breivik opened in April 2012. That was to be my second article about Norway. Until terror struck us, I had never written anything about my own country. It was uncharted territory. All my working life, I had been a foreign correspondent, starting off as a Moscow correspondent at twenty-three, straight from Russian studies at Oslo University. My home country was my refuge, not a place to write about. I came home from Tripoli just before the trial was due to start, got my accreditation and a seat in the courtroom, and found myself knocked sideways.
I was not prepared.