Norwegian Police Security Service

The Norwegian Police Security Service is represented in the play by officers who enter the orbit of the secret Oslo Channel and assess its Palestinian participants as potential security threats. The agency’s dramatic significance lies less in any institutional action than in this collision: private diplomacy depends on trust and discretion, while the security officers arrive with allegations of violence and espionage that frame the negotiators through suspicion.

Identity and Personnel

The character descriptions establish Thor Bjornevog as a senior officer with the Police Intelligence Service and Trond Gundersen as an officer with the same service. The play thus gives the organization a presence through two individuals with distinct ranks, though it supplies no wider account of its structure, formal remit, or decision-making. Their placement in the cast connects the agency to the Norwegian state’s security apparatus without making it a negotiating party in its own right.

The surrounding diplomatic effort is explicitly clandestine. Terje Rød-Larsen proposes a second channel built not on public pronouncements between governments but on private conversations in an isolated place, where Israeli and Palestine Liberation Organization representatives can meet. The stated purpose is to create conditions for direct discussion; the play also emphasizes that the secret work puts people’s lives at risk. Against that background, the security officers embody the possibility that the hidden process may be watched, assessed, or treated as a threat.

Entry into the Secret Talks

At one meeting, after Israeli participants enter and Uri Savir closes the door, two agents identified in the stage directions as Norwegian Secret Service Agents enter the room. Larsen greets them and asks them to repeat their names. The scene presents their arrival as an intrusion into a gathering already defined by secrecy, but not as a raid: the agents take part in the room’s proceedings, and the evidence does not show them arresting, removing, or physically obstructing anyone.

Thor describes a rota under which one of the officers is on duty and the other off at all times. Larsen then tells them that the mission is unusually grave and complex and undertakes to explain who the men in the room are. The exchange places the officers inside the practical circumstances of the talks while underscoring their unfamiliarity, as Larsen portrays it, with a diplomatic assignment of this kind. Their presence is therefore both operational and dramatically uneasy: security personnel have been brought close to the process, but the scene does not establish that they share its aims or understand its method.

Intelligence Claims and Suspicion

The officers’ descriptions of the Palestinian representatives turn the meeting into an encounter between diplomacy and intelligence assessment. Thor identifies Ahmed Qurie by his date and place of birth—March 26, 1937, near Jerusalem—and says that he reports to Yasser Arafat. Thor further claims that Arafat ordered multiple assassinations on Norwegian soil and that he personally stopped them. The play presents this as Thor’s account, not as an independently confirmed finding; its immediate effect is to define Qurie through an alleged connection to violence before the negotiations can be considered on their own terms.

Trond similarly characterizes Hassan Asfour by referring to his studies in Moscow at Patrice Lumumba University and asserting that Trond’s personal investigation found he had been recruited to spy for the Soviets. That allegation, too, is delivered as an officer’s assessment rather than established fact. Together, the claims show the security officers sorting the negotiators into categories of risk. The contrast with the channel’s stated design is sharp: the talks seek intimate discussion between people who have been enemies, while the officers’ introductions foreground suspected assassinations and espionage. Larsen’s blink after Trond’s claim marks a pause in the exchange, but does not settle whether the claims are accurate.

Dramatic Function and Limits

The agency’s role is to make the secrecy of the Oslo Channel feel exposed to another kind of scrutiny. Its officers do not formulate proposals, broker an agreement, or appear as principals in the political negotiations. Instead, their presence and their descriptions of Qurie and Asfour give the audience a view of the security logic pressing against the fragile trust required for the channel to work. The scene’s tension comes from that overlap: officials charged with security are now in the same room as people whose identities they have framed as dangerous.

The play later presents the back channel as receiving an offer to become the official channel, a change in diplomatic status proposed on behalf of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. The available scenes do not attribute that transition to the Norwegian Police Security Service, nor do they show the agency authorizing the talks or determining their outcome. Its significance is narrower and more concrete: it is the institutional presence at the edge of a secret process, reminding the audience that clandestine diplomacy unfolds amid real assessments of danger, and that those assessments can complicate the very human contact the negotiations require.