there was the sexual nature of their relationship.31 Aage said that social workers put in their reports ‘the mother and Anders sleep in the same bed at night with very close bodily contact’, but nothing was done about this. As an older man, Breivik would sit on top of her on the sofa and attempt to kiss her. He even once bought his mother a dildo.32
The psychological impact of this childhood clearly distorted Breivik’s view of the world and of himself. ‘He was almost like a zombie,’ Aage said. ‘His manifesto was very consumer-driven but it was lifeless. He defined himself by his brands. He’d go and buy a sushi dinner for a hundred euros or go and buy a thousand-euro outfit. It was a form of hyper-consumerism.’
The interesting thing, though, was how much the Norwegian legal debate during the killer’s trial appeared to focus on the psychological past of Breivik. There were two forensic psychiatric reports done on him. The first came back with the diagnosis that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia – making him criminally insane. The other was a diagnosis of a compound personality disorder, with an emphasis on narcissism and paranoia – meaning he was criminally sane. The court settled for the second view.
The media, in turn, fixated on issues like right-wing extremism in Europe, the ability of the internet to help radicalise young men and the failures of the police on that dark day for not pre-empting the attack. But one issue was largely ignored in all of this.
‘No, there was not much debate about gun laws,’ Aage said. This surprised me. In the US most massacres stimulate the gun law debate. But here in Norway it was the focus on society and on Breivik’s upbringing that dominated.
Even by Breivik’s own account, though, guns and military paraphernalia were central to his planning. He had to overcome a problem – in Norway it’s not that easy to get your hands on a gun.33 So he spent six days in Prague in the early autumn of 2010, because he believed the Czech Republic’s gun laws were amongst the most relaxed in Europe and that he would be able to buy what he wanted there: namely, a Glock pistol, hand-grenades and a rocket-propelled grenade.
Before Breivik left Norway, he even hollowed out the back seat of his Hyundai to clear space for the firearms he intended to buy. But he failed to get any, writing later that Prague was ‘far from an ideal city to buy guns’. His only ‘success’ was having sex twice.
Returning to Olso, Breivik ended up buying his weapons through legal channels. He said in his manifesto he could do this because he had a ‘clean criminal record, hunting licence, and two guns already for seven years’. In 2010 he got a permit for one more gun: a $2000 .223-calibre Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic carbine; he said he was buying it to shoot deer.
The next thing he wanted was a pistol, but getting a permit for that proved much more difficult. He had to demonstrate regular attendance at a sport-shooting club and so, from November 2010 to January 2011, Breivik went through fifteen training sessions at the Oslo Pistol Club. And with each lesson, his ugly plan came closer and closer to its bitter end, like a spider patiently waiting for a killing.
By mid January his application to purchase a Glock pistol was approved. He then bought ten thirty-round magazines for the rifle from a US supplier, and six magazines for the pistol in Norway.
The rest we know.
Perhaps because it took Breivik so much time to arm himself, or perhaps because of a wider refusal to believe that firearms had a pivotal role in the massacre, guns did not play a major part in the debates following the killings. There was a brief suspension of Norwegians’ ability to buy semi-automatic rifles, but the hunting lobby there appears to have influenced the policy-makers, and that law was quietly dropped.34 And today Norway still allows semi-automatic guns.
In a country where reasonable debate seems so lauded, this struck me as odd. Clearly, the numbers that Breivik killed was partly down to his having trapped the students on an island. But the fact he could shoot and shoot again without having to pause to cock his rifle must have given the children he was shooting less time to run into the trees and hide.
Rather, it seemed that for a society like Norway, one that has such self-belief, to comprehend what Breivik had done they had to focus more on the failure of the individual, his mother and the police response, not on their own gun laws or their own failings as a country. Maybe this was the right response, though. After all, you can’t let one idiot with a gun change the way you live. If you do that, then they win.
With that thought, I said goodbye to Aage. The blackness of what the mass shooter was capable of was in danger of consuming my attention. The more you looked into that abyss, the more your gaze was held. So I shifted my focus onto something else, but equally sinister: the way of the assassin.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the person who first inadvertently introduced me to the dark world of the assassin was wearing a bulletproof vest at the time, precisely because he feared one of their bullets.
It was a late springtime London when I received a phone call from someone I had never spoken to before, and they asked me if I would like to meet a man I had never met. I was told this could be of real interest to me, and on hearing his name I thought the same. Julian Assange – the Australian provocateur, a Scarlet Pimpernel for our digital age – wanted to talk.
Julian was at London’s choice venue for hard-bitten hacks and war correspondents, the Frontline Club in Paddington. Heading there, I found him holed up in one of their rooms, being interviewed by CNN. Nervous and a little self-conscious, he was unused to the media spotlight and here he was being asked about a set of documents his whistleblowing organisation, Wikileaks, had just released: a cache of military reports that exposed the truth about America’s war in Afghanistan.
Julian had some of the most controversial secret documents ever to find their way to the light of day. Millions of files from the US diplomatic and military operations overseas that had been leaked by their soldier Bradley Manning. And I was there, as the editor of the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, to see if my outfit could have a peek. Julian, interested in the Bureau’s ability to make documentary films, was keen to see if the contents of another set of files, this time the Iraq War military reports, could end up on TV channels the world over.
It was a treasure trove of documents that proved there were war crimes and human rights abuses, incompetence and intrigues on the part of the US military in Iraq. And Julian gave it over, countless classified military files, on a USB stick in a Lebanese restaurant near Paddington station.
As I got to know Julian, his appearance changed considerably as the world focused more and more on what he had leaked. He lost weight, dyed his hair bleach blond, took on a lined tiredness. But there was one thing that was constant: his bulletproof vest. He feared a CIA attack, that he was an assassin’s target, and I couldn’t help but look at the bulky blue vest and think: headshot.
A few days after giving the Bureau the files on the Iraq War, I was told by Julian to download a messenger system called Jabber. It was an encrypted service that lets people talk relatively securely. So that night, as London foxes barked outside my window and the streets were silent in sleep, I logged on and began a conversation with one of the most controversial men in the world at that time.
Caught in the green-blue glow of a screen, I was told to download certain applications, and his terse words guided me through a portal I had never known existed. I felt ashamed at my technological illiteracy. He told me about TOR, a system that allows its users to search the internet without their computer’s address being revealed. One that lets you look at websites untraced, because TOR wraps your servers’
