One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (40 page)

Breivik was still very close by. It took him a long time to get through the eastern city centre and the tunnel under the Oslofjord before he re-emerged at ground level in the western part of the centre. From the
Opera Tunnel he drove past the US embassy, which was now swarming with security personnel. The police had taken up positions outside the embassy. He drove right past. Ha, they’ve assumed it’s Islamic terrorism of course, he thought. He amused himself listening to the terror experts on the radio saying this pointed to al-Qaida.

The security mobilisation at the embassy pushed up his stress level
a bit and he was afraid someone would react to the fact that he was wearing a helmet and uniform in a delivery van. He had to calm down. The crucial thing was not to crash. He passed the corner of the Royal Gardens, he crossed Parkveien, where the Prime Minister was in a secure room, and he drove up Bygdøy Allé with its exclusive shops. There were clusters of green horse chestnuts hanging on the
huge trees. He was in his own district, his own biotope. He passed blocks of luxury flats, he drove past Fritzners gate where he had lived in the very first years of his life. A few streets away, on the other side of the avenue, was the flat he had rented in his twenties. He knew the streets here, the bars and the shops. He knew the escape routes and shortcuts. He now knew he would get out of the
city; the police would never be able to close off all the roads to the west.

He sped out of Oslo.

*   *   *

As time went on, there were more reports from members of the public who had observed a man in uniform leaving the van a few minutes before it blew up. The security guards in several ministry buildings viewed the CCTV tapes that showed the sequence of events from different angles. They
provided a description identical to the one given by Andreas Olsen.

But no alerts were sent out from the joint operational centre at the police headquarters in Oslo, neither to the force itself nor to the public via the media.

At 15.55, half an hour after the bomb had gone off, an operator happened to see the yellow note lying on the unit leader’s desk. Twenty minutes had passed since Andreas
Olsen reported his information. Now, they rang him back and asked him to go through it all again.

‘And that was before the explosion?’ asked the operator after Olsen had once again explained what he had seen.

‘Five…’

‘What did you say – it was?’

‘It was five minutes before the explosion.’

‘Are you sure he was in police uniform?’

‘There was a police badge on the sleeve. I can’t say whether
it was a genuine police uniform. But I thought police, because I saw a helmet with one of those glass visors in front and he’d got a pistol out. So I wondered if there was some operation going on, because I thought the whole thing was … that is, something made me react.’

‘But that was five minutes before the explosion?’

Olsen confirmed this again and gave a description: European appearance,
in his thirties, about 1.80 metres tall. The operator became convinced that this was an important lead. ‘Good observation. What was the registration number of that car?’

By the time they rang off, it was 16.02.

After the call, the operator marked the report as
Important
in the operation log and made sure it was accessible to all. She also filled in the on-scene commander, who asked her to pass
the report on to a patrol from the emergency response squad. It was impossible to get through on the communication radio, so she found their mobile number and rang them.

At 16.03, Breivik passed the police station in Sandvika, on the E18. If the officers had been looking out of the windows, they would have seen the silver-grey van driving past on the main road. Sandvika had men ready and waiting,
but did not know what to do with them and was awaiting a request for assistance from Oslo.

At 16.05 the operator in Oslo made a mobile phone call to the emergency response unit informing them of the man in a dark uniform driving a Fiat Doblò. She also gave them the registration number. The patrol said the description was too vague for any action to be taken.

At 16.09 the chief of operations
in Asker and Bærum, the district through which Breivik was now driving, finally got through to Oslo police district to offer assistance. She was informed about the van and the possible perpetrator. At that point in time, the station at Asker and Bærum had three patrol cars at its disposal; the chief of operations rang the closest one and gave the description. This patrol was on its way to Ila prison
to pick up a prisoner who was to be taken to Oslo. The chief of operations asked them to postpone the prisoner transport because of the bomb in Oslo. She also alerted the two other patrols and read over the radio the type of vehicle, registration number and description. Then she once again contacted the patrol at Ila prison, which by then should have been free, and commanded it to go out on observation
along the E18.

But the two policemen in the patrol car had chosen to ignore their orders. They had picked up the prisoner from the prison after all and were now on their way into Oslo. They had wanted to ‘get the job out of the way’, they said. In the operation log, the prisoner transport was marked Priority 5, the lowest level. The country’s seat of government had been blown up yet the patrol
decided to act on its own whim. Asker and Bærum’s second patrol had been busy with a psychiatric assignment and had been given orders to leave it. That order was not obeyed either.

And this at the very moment Breivik was driving through their district, in a light-coloured Fiat Doblò VH 24605, just like the one the chief of operations had described to them over the radio. Two police patrols could
have been positioned along the E18 and could have followed him. Nobody did. Breivik pushed on westwards.

To judge by the way the Oslo police was behaving, little indicated that Norway had just been the target of an act of terror, with an acute risk of secondary attacks. When other districts offered support, their offers were largely declined, even though many potential targets around Oslo remained
unsecured. The Parliament requested reinforcements as there were no armed officers outside the main building. You will have to make do with your own guards, the head of the Oslo operational centre informed them. Just close off some of your buildings, the head of security at the Parliament was told. The Labour Party offices at Youngstorget asked for police guards; the House of the People asked
for police guards. Their requests were turned down, with the advice to evacuate their premises.

Norway owns a single police helicopter. And in July, the helicopter service was on holiday. As a consequence of new savings measures, there was no emergency crew cover at the height of the summer. The first pilot nonetheless reported for duty right after hearing about the bomb on the news. He was told
he was not needed.

Yet the emergency response unit requested use of the helicopter twice in the hour that followed. The squad was informed that the helicopter was unavailable, even though it was on the tarmac, fully operational and ready to fly. Nor did the police take any steps to mobilise military helicopters or make use of civilian helicopter companies.

After the bomb in Oslo, no immediate
nationwide alert was sent out. A nationwide alert is issued to communicate information considered important to all the police districts in the country. When such an alert goes out, all police stations follow a standard procedure. In Asker and Bærum, this would have involved setting up a police roadblock on the E16 at Sollihøgda, towards which Anders Behring Breivik was currently heading.

When
the duty manager at Kripos, the National Criminal Investigation Service, contacted the chief of operations of the Oslo police to ask if they could help in any way, the exchange ran as follows:

Oslo: Well, er, you could, that is, it might be interesting to maybe issue a warning, send out a national warning.

Kripos: Yes. What do you want it to say?

Oslo: No, that is, well it’s interesting now because a van was spotted here, uh-huh. A small grey delivery van. VH 24605. So if you could send out, that is, a national warning that there’s been an attack here, and then that the police districts are bearing it in mind.

Kripos: The van?

Oslo: Yes, and any other activity, because it could be interesting on routes to border crossings. Mmm, maybe alert the customs service, which is at most of the borders at least.

The conversation ended without the chief of operations clarifying that the van could be the vehicle of a potential perpetrator, that the individual driving it had been observed at the scene, and that he was wearing a police uniform and was armed.

The information provided by witnesses was not read out over any general communication wavelength, nor was it passed on to
the media so that alerts could go out on radio and television. The Public Roads Authority in Oslo, which has a comprehensive network of cameras, was not alerted either. Despite the fact that the government quarter – Norway’s most important seat of power – had been blown to smithereens by a bomb, the terror-response plan was not implemented.

Nobody pressed the big button.

The resources available
were not exploited.

Meanwhile, Breivik drove calmly on towards Sollihøgda. He kept to the speed limit. He did not want to overtake anyone, or be overtaken. He had to avoid anyone who might look into the van and think there was something not quite right about him.

At 16.16 he passed Sollihøgda. Down to his left lay the Tyrifjord.

Soon, he would be able to see Utøya.

*   *   *

You had to put
your best people in defence.

And these last few summers on Utøya, Simon had been the workhorse of the Troms football team. Among the activists he was the fittest and most experienced team player; he was good at countering attacks, getting the ball and kicking it away up the pitch. He was also the one who got most annoyed with the slowcoaches. ‘Get a move on!’ or ‘Run faster’ he would shout. He
did not approve of halfhearted efforts – that was no fun. You were here to win.

Brage and Geir Kåre played in the midfield, while Viljar made an impressive forward. He ran fast and scored the most goals. Once, late at night after a long party, he and Simon argued about who was actually fastest, and they decided to race each other across the kilometre length of the Tromsø Bridge. Ready, steady,
go! They ran, but admitted defeat after a few hundred metres. The effects of the party won out in the end.

They were happy to live not knowing who was fastest, and now Viljar had a hat-trick to celebrate – three goals in the same match.

Gunnar Linaker reigned supreme in goal. The Troms county secretary was a big, burly type who weighed over a hundred kilos but he threw himself around in all
directions. He was so muddy after the match that Mari had to hose him down. He had also strained his groin, and rang a medical student friend in Tromsø. ‘You’ll have to lie down and rest until it stops hurting,’ the friend advised. Not a chance. Troms had won all its matches so far and was the first team to qualify for the semi-finals. He would be playing in spite of the pain. They were going to win
the tournament this year!

Anders Kristiansen was nowhere to be seen during the matches, not even as a spectator and cheerleader. They could have done with his enthusiasm and loud voice, but he had other duties to perform and was busy preparing the political programme. The eighteen-year-old had arrived at the island a few days before the others to attend a training course for the election campaign
that was to start after the holidays. Anders was on the Labour Party list for the local council elections in Bardu and was hoping to win a seat in September. From late summer he was going to travel round to schools all over Troms to take part in election debates and it was important to polish up his arguments and his style. Debating was what he most enjoyed. He had recordings of several parliamentary
debates that had been shown on TV, including those on the data storage directive and the postal services directive, and he made a careful study of how the various representatives put over their points, what worked and what did not, how you could defeat your opponent, ridicule him, render him harmless or undermine his credibility. How he was looking forward to the election campaign!

After the
football match there were political seminars. They could choose between such topics as ‘My dear brother in dark blue – the experience of Conservative government in Sweden’ or ‘Violence against women and children’ or an update on climate negotiations.

Mari and Simon opted for something they knew nothing about, ‘Western Sahara – Africa’s last colony’. They learned about the Sahrawis’ fight against
the Moroccan occupation of their land while they were exiled to the most inhospitable desert areas, cut off by a wall over two thousand kilometres in length, in a place where over a million landmines maimed people and cattle every year. Freedom of expression was limited and there were disappearances and arbitrary imprisonments.

‘We’ve got to get to work on this,’ Mari whispered to Simon.

As
the seminar was drawing to a close, disquiet spread through the room. Conversations were conducted in loud whispers while the human rights activist from Western Sahara carried on speaking. A boy stood up and interrupted the Sahrawi to say that there had been a big explosion in Oslo. He referred to his iPhone and what he had read on the internet. Many were frightened; a number of the camp participants
from the Oslo area had parents who worked in or near the government quarter.

The seminar was abruptly ended by a boy who came to summon everyone to a meeting. It was to be held in the main hall, where they were now, so Mari and Simon stayed in their places. At the meeting, AUF leader Eskil Pedersen gave them the latest information on the explosion. But it was nothing more than they could read
for themselves on their iPhones.