Espionage High Flyer

Telling his wife that he was dashing off to Paris on an official mission, he kissed her goodbye on a January morning in 1984, then caught a cab to Oslo's Fornebu Airport. Once there, however, Arne Treholt, 42, the up-and-coming head of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry's press office, checked in for a flight to Vienna. His alleged plan: to meet with Gennadi Titov, a Soviet KGB agent, and hand him Foreign Ministry secrets.

Treholt missed his date. As he was about to board his plane he was arrested by two Norwegian counterintelligence agents. His briefcase was found to contain 66 documents, 65 of them classified. Several were reports from secret NATO meetings.

After more than a year of investigation and interrogation, Treholt last week became one of the highest-ranking Western diplomats ever to be tried on charges of spying for the Soviet Union. Many of the proceedings are expected to be held in camera, but information about Treholt's alleged spying career has begun to emerge. Prosecutors will try to prove that the diplomat was an undercover agent for the KGB for ten years.

According to court papers made public last week, Treholt stands accused of handing over a wide array of secrets, including details of Norwegian and NATO air-defense systems, as well as reports describing the defense of Norway's strategic border with the Soviet Union. Some Western intelligence officials fear that his activities have been highly damaging to NATO.

Treholt, a former reporter for the Norwegian Labor Party daily newspaper Arbeiderbladet, went into government service in 1973 as political secretary to the Minister for Commerce and Shipping. The next year he allegedly handed over his first secrets about NATO defenses. According to the prosecution, Treholt claimed after his arrest that he had been secretly photographed in 1975 while at an orgy in Moscow. From then on, say Norwegian officials, he was a Soviet spy. He was posted in 1979 to the Norwegian delegation to the United Nations in New York, where he regularly handed over information to a Soviet diplomat.

Immediately after his arrest, security officials say, Treholt offered to become a double agent, a gesture they refused. Treholt, who faces a jail , sentence of up to 20 years if found guilty, admits that he passed minor classified documents to KGB agents. But, he declared from the dock, "I have never on any occasion betrayed information concerning the nation's security or military secrets."