I have also used the police interviews of some witnesses who knew Breivik. In these instances, I have given no names.
The couple with whom Anders Behring Breivik was placed on several occasions when he was two years old did not wish to contribute to the book. The information I provide about them is taken exclusively from their police interviews.
Other than that, I largely used the police interviews as background information and to check the facts of Anders Behring Breivik’s life.
In a number of places in the book, I refer to the perpetrator’s thoughts or judgements. Readers might want to know: How does the author know this?
Everything is taken from what he himself said in police interviews, at the trial or to the psychiatrists.
I would like to give a few examples. In the chapter entitled ‘Friday’, I write in detail about Breivik’s thoughts during the first killings. In that sequence, various sentences are lifted directly from the trial transcripts. Breivik described his feelings and thoughts both to the police in the days after the terror act and in court nine months later, as follows: ‘I don’t feel remotely like doing this’ and ‘Now or never. It’s now or never.’ These sentences are used as direct quotations. In some places his statements are turned into indirect speech: ‘His body was fighting against it, his muscles were twitching. He felt he would never be able to go through with it. A hundred voices in his head were screaming: Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it!’ It was Breivik who talked about his body and his muscles, and referred to the hundred voices screaming in his head. I have used his own words. That is how I have worked throughout the book. His thoughts set out here all derive from what he said in police or court documents.
My statement that it was easy for him to go on killing after the first assassinations is taken from what the gunman explicitly told the police and the court. He spoke at length about how difficult the first shot was and how easy it all felt once he broke through the barrier, an almost physical barrier. He said that initially it had felt unnatural to kill.
So the next question is this: Can we trust his account?
A journalist must constantly evaluate and bear in mind the degree of veracity in any statement. In Breivik’s case, a number of his stories seem rather far-fetched. This applies particularly to his accounts of his childhood and youth, the positive gloss he puts on them and on his own popularity, and his claim to have been a king in hip-hop circles and a rising star in the Progress Party. My doubts about his portrayal of these sections of his life stem from finding a large number of accounts that contradict the idealised picture he attempts to convey. These testimonies largely agree with each other and they diverge markedly from his own version of events.
The other point at which he appears to be making things up is in his account of the Knights Templar organisation. The Norwegian police never found anything to verify his claims that the organisation existed or that he was a commander or leader of it. Nor could the prosecution discover that the organisation had any basis in fact.
These were the two subjects on which he declined to elaborate in court: his childhood and adolescence, and the Knights Templar. He said that the former was irrelevant and that his refusal to talk about the latter was to ‘protect the identities of others in the network’.
The question of the Knights Templar was central to the discussion of whether Anders Behring Breivik was of sound mind. If the network did not exist, was it a delusion or a lie? The court’s verdict affirmed the latter.
Regarding the day on Utøya, the terrorist explained in detail and on several different occasions what he did, the order in which he did it, and what he was thinking as he did it. He discussed this the same evening, on the island, and the next morning at the police station, and on a later site visit to the island, and to the psychiatrists and the court. He spoke in an easy, unforced way; he elaborated, made associations, thought over what he was not sure about and revised his account accordingly, and admitted that there were some things he could not remember. It did not appear to be difficult for him to repeat things, to respond to the same questions over and over again, as it can be when one has constructed a story. The police made a thorough check of his log claims and timings. Thus far they have found nothing in his Utøya account that does not tally with the statements of the young people who were there – in terms of the conversations he had, the words he shouted, or the concrete situations in which killings took place. The police have stated that in regard to his preparations and his implementation of his attack, they have not uncovered a single direct lie or misinformation.
However, there is some disagreement about when Breivik began the planning for his attack. The perpetrator claims it was back in 2002. Neither the police nor the prosecution think he started that early. My job is not to speculate, but to look for information. What we know from the police logs is exactly how long he spent on every website, and when. We know that he played hardcore computer games after moving back in with his mother in 2006 (for example, he played for seventeen hours one New Year’s Eve). He gradually turned from the games to anti-jihadist and right-wing extremist websites. In the chapter ‘Choose Yourself a World’ I restricted myself to well-founded facts about how the game he was playing was constructed, and external elements such as what his room looked like and the fact that he tapped away at the computer keyboard. I went so far as to conclude that it was ‘a good place to be’, that ‘the game drew him in and calmed him down’ and that he lost interest in real life. I based the first of these statements on what he said, the second on comments from his friends and mother. I also based what I wrote on information from his fellow players, those who knew him as Andersnordic.
The police data provides an indication of what he was doing online at any particular time. It also indicates that the planning of the terror act came much later than he says, maybe as late as the winter of 2010, when he received the last rejection from the Progress Party and no response from his online anti-jihadist heroes. What we know is that he only started buying weapons and bullets in the spring of 2010. Later that year, he began to purchase ingredients for the bomb.
In researching his life, my first priority was to find the pieces and fit them together into the jigsaw puzzle of Anders Behring Breivik. There are still many pieces missing.
In August 2012, Norway’s 22 July Commission presented its report. I relied on its account of the course of events during the terrorist attack. I used the commission’s report to confirm the timing of events on that day. I also quoted from it for the telephone tip-off from Andreas Olsen and the conversations between Kripos and the operation manager on the question of issuing a nationwide alert, as well as Breivik’s own calls from Utøya. In the report, these phone conversations are written down word for word.
I also referred to the report for the dates of Breivik’s purchases of weapons, clothing, chemicals and fertiliser.
In mapping the course of events on 22 July I was helped by Kjetil Stormark’s book Da terroren rammet Norge (When Terror Struck Norway). I also quoted private emails sent by Breivik that were included in Stormark’s Massemorderens private e-poster (The Mass Murderer’s Private Emails). Stormark also offered important advice during the writing process.
The scenes in which the lawyer Geir Lippestad is called by the police on 23 July and in which he meets Breivik on 23 December 2011 are taken from Lippestad’s own book Det vi kan stå for (What We Can Stand By). The induction rituals of the order of Freemasons are taken from Frimurernes hemmeligheter (The Secrets of the Freemasons) by Roger Karsten Aase. The quotations from Carl I. Hagen are from Elisabeth Skarsbø Moen’s Profet i eget land – historien om Carl I. Hagen (Prophet in His Own Country – the Story of Carl I. Hagen). The story of Monica Bøsei and Utøya is taken from Utøya – en biografi (Utøya: A Biography), written by Jo Stein Moen and Trond Giske.