A former Danish defense minister, who had publicly claimed that Danish secret services were helping US intelligence spy on several European leaders, said on Tuesday he was accused of leaking state secrets.
The Danish judiciary said the country’s justice minister had accepted a recommendation to charge a former lawmaker, whose name it did not name, for “dissemination or transmission of important state secrets”.
“The case includes highly confidential information that cannot be presented openly,” prosecutor Jakob Berger Nielsen said in a statement. “Beyond the great public interest, in the opinion of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, there is clearly a heavier consideration to be given to the work of the intelligence services”.
Danish media called the suspect Claus Hjort Frederiksen, a 75-year-old former defense minister who retired from politics last year, and later confirmed it on Facebook.
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“I have not disclosed alleged state secrets. Period,” he wrote on Facebook. “This was not how I had dreamed my retirement would be.”
In several interviews in 2020 and 2021, Hjort Frederiksen said that the Danish defense intelligence service, responsible for overseas activities, had helped the NSA wiretap leaders in Germany, France, Sweden and Norway, including the former chancellor German Angela Merkel. She later said she faced preliminary charges for revealing covert cable cooperation with the United States
Danish Defense Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen attends a round table discussion at NATO headquarters in Brussels, June 8, 2018. Frederiksen has been accused of leaking state secrets. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
In an interview with public broadcaster DR in December 2021, Hjort Frederiksen said, “I have to risk a prison sentence” for making the allegations.
In June 2021, DR said that the Danish military intelligence service had conducted an internal investigation in 2014 into whether the NSA used its cooperation with the Danes to spy against Denmark and neighboring countries. The investigation, codenamed “Operation Dunhammer,” concluded that the NSA had wiretapped political leaders.
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The alleged deal between the United States and Denmark has reportedly allowed the NSA to obtain data using politicians’ phone numbers as search parameters. The military agency allegedly helped the NSA from 2012 to 2014.
Reports in 2013 that the NSA had been listening to German government phones, including Merkel’s, prompted a diplomatic row between Berlin and Washington, with French President Emmanuel Macron saying that, if correct, “this is not acceptable between allies”.
The then Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg called it “unacceptable” and said that spying on others “creates more distrust than collaboration”.
In 2022, the government asked lawmakers to remove Hjort Frederiksen’s parliamentary immunity, but the majority opposed the move because it was unknown what he was suspected of.
“I no longer stood for election (at the end of 2022) and my parliamentary immunity has thus expired,” Hjort Frederiksen wrote on his Facebook profile on February 18. recommendation by the prosecution to press charges”.
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Hjort Frederiksen served as defense minister from November 2016 to June 2019 and previously covered the finance and employment portfolios. For years he was a senior member of the Liberal Party and left parliament in November to retire.
No trial date has been set. If tried and convicted of the charges, Hjort Frederiksen faces up to 12 years in prison.
