Gunvor Galtung Haavik

Gunvor Galtung Haavik (7 October 1912 – 5 August 1977) was a Norwegian employee of the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs who was arrested on 27 January 1977 after being betrayed by Oleg Gordievsky and charged with espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union and treason. She confessed to these crimes, and then died, apparently of heart failure, before the case came to trial.

Gunvor Galtung Haavik in 1945.

Haavik was born in Oslo[1] and studied medicine at the University of Oslo from 1932 to 1933, but gave up these studies and became a nurse instead. She worked at hospitals in Norway and spent the war years at a hospital in Bodø, where she picked up Russian and fell in love with a Russian prisoner of war, Vladimir Koslov. Consequently, in 1946, the foreign ministry hired her as an interpreter.

In 1947, she was assigned to the Norwegian embassy in Moscow and was shortly thereafter recruited by the KGB. She maintained an intimate affair with Koslov for two years and committed to spying on behalf of the Soviet Union after the KGB threatened to deport him to Siberia. In 1955, she returned to Oslo but continued her espionage activities through a Soviet handler.

On 3 October 2008 the film Iskyss premiered in Norwegian cinemas. The film is an adaptation of the biography by the same title by investigative journalist and author Alf R. Jacobsen and is directed by Knut Erik Jensen.

  1. Rikshospitalet Oslo, Parish register (official) no. 14 (1909-1912), Born and baptised 1912, Page 366
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