To document the process and help market the compendium, he had bought a camera, and planned to use Photoshop to compensate for his lack of photographic skill.
In the log he carefully wrote out his shopping list, encouraging all interested parties to follow his example: ‘There is absolutely NO GOOD REASON for not getting this equipment out of fear you will be found out. All that is holding you back is unjustified anxiety and laziness! The only reason that could justify your fear is having an Islamic name!’
On 13 February 2011 he turned thirty-two, and two days after his birthday, which he did not celebrate, he started editing the film that was to ‘market the compendium’ he was in the process of compiling. He downloaded images from anti-Islamic websites and added music he liked, dramatic and emotive. Twelve days later he was satisfied with his film. He noted in his log: ‘I would love to make it even better but I can’t really afford to invest any more time into this trailer which might never see the light of day…’ He added: ‘Was planning to hire a low-cost Asian movie guy through scriptlance.com but I have to conserve my funds.’
By February, his weight had gone up from 86 to 93 kilos and he had never felt in better shape. He was 50 per cent stronger, he thought, and this would undoubtedly prove useful, he underlined in his log.
In the spring, just before he moved away from home, he received a letter from the Freemasons’ lodge with an offer of promotion to degree 4 and 5 even though he had hardly attended any meetings. He replied that he was not available, because he was away travelling for extended periods. He no longer needed the lodge that he had once implored to admit him. He had created his own lodge, where he made the rules.
The letting contract had been signed on 5 April, and the very next day the new farmer at Vålstua contacted the Norwegian Agricultural Producers’ Register to inform them of changes at Breivik Geofarm. The business address was to be changed from Oslo to the district of Åmot. The farm’s change of use to the production of root crops and tubers would have to be registered. The farm would have to have a new business code, and he needed a producer number in order to get fertiliser.
He was now so hyped up that he abandoned his usual caution and let his impatience for formal approval from the Producers’ Register show, to the extent that the official dealing with his case began to wonder. In mid-April, the official carried out a background check on Breivik.
‘He keeps on pestering… Is there anything on him?’ he queried in an email to his boss, requesting a check on the tenant at Vålstua. Nothing showed up, and a week later confirmation was sent out that the change of use had been approved.
On 4 May Anders hired a Fiat Doblò from Avis and moved out of his mother’s flat. He had ordered six tonnes of fertiliser on credit. The bags were delivered the day he moved in at Vålstua. As agreed, half of it was driven into the barn, the other half unloaded beside some birch trees on the property.
That first day on the farm, he constructed the metal framework of the bomb. The next day he started crushing the aspirin tablets to extract the acetylsalicylic acid. The internet advised him to use a pestle and mortar, but within a couple of hours his hands were aching terribly and he had pulverised only a small portion of the tablets. There had to be another way. He put a large sheet of plastic on the floor of the barn and started crushing them with a twenty-kilo dumbbell he used for weight training. Four hours later, he had crushed a hundred and fifty packets of aspirin.
Many of the instructions were defective. He experimented and failed, tried different things and took a creative approach. He went to IKEA and bought three toilet brushes with steel holders to use as detonator containers. He planned to seal them with aluminium discs cut to shape, or screws and coins. From China he bought sixty waterproof bags ideal for storing and transporting chemicals.
When it came to extracting the acetylsalicylic acid from the powdered aspirin, none of the instructions he tried seemed to work and he ended up with useless salicylic acid. He trawled the internet desperately and dejection set in. ‘If I couldn’t even synthesise the first phase of the easiest booster how on earth would I manage to synthesise DDNP?! My world crashed that day and I tried to develop an alternative plan,’ he wrote in his log. To raise his spirits he went to a restaurant in the local town of Rena and treated himself to a three-course meal. Then he watched a few episodes of The Shield.
His mood swings were rapid and sharp. The steroids were affecting his mental state as well as his muscles. He could push himself more but he could also go to pieces without warning. But he always pulled himself together again, aware of the pressure of time.
None of the methods he had found online, primarily laboratory experiments from various universities, had enabled him to extract the acid concentration he needed. The next day proved fruitless too. He went out to the restaurant again in the evening to give himself a morale boost and ponder a new plan. ‘I appear to be fundamentally fucked if I cannot manage to find a solution soon,’ he wrote in his log on Saturday evening, 7 May.
When he woke up on Sunday morning, he went straight on to the internet. After several hours he found a YouTube video with very few previous hits. It showed an unconventional method for extracting the acid he wanted. The guy in the video used a suction pump and a dehumidifier in a laboratory, and succeeded where all the other chemists on the web had failed.
On Monday morning Anders tried doing the same himself, using coffee filters and natural air-drying rather than lab equipment. Despite not being entirely sure that it was in fact purified acetylsalicylic acid he had produced, he decided he had no option but to stake everything on the method. A calculated risk, he wrote in the log, since he could not know the quality of the product he had made. He used Tuesday to make the ice required for the extraction process. He filled the freezer with ice-cube bags, and had to make sure each layer had frozen before he added the next, so the bags would not tear under the weight of the next layer. He spent the whole week filtering.
‘I just love Eurovision,’ he noted in the log on Saturday 14 May, awarding himself a night off to watch the final of the song contest. He had watched all the semi-finals. ‘My country has a crap, politically correct contribution as always. An asylum seeker from Kenya, performing a bongo song, very representative of Europe and my country… In any case, I hope Germany wins.’
Azerbaijan won.
The day before Norwegian National Day the magnetic stirrer, a special hotplate for heating unstable fluids, stopped working. ‘Fuck, Chinese piece of shit equipment, I should have rather paid more to get good European quality machinery!’ he wrote, and ordered another one. It would take too long to produce picric acid and DDNP without a magnetic stirrer.
That evening he completed the extraction of the acid he needed from the last aspirin tablets, using a spatula to get the remains of the crystallised material out of the coffee filters. He spread it on plastic, and with the help of an oil heater raised the temperature in the room to thirty degrees to dry the acetylsalicylic acid.