One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (57 page)

The room had never been used before. It did not have a single scratch.

* 
  *   *

In August the previous year, twenty days after the terrorist attacks, the man in the waiting cell had met the first pair of psychiatrists. There was one woman and one man: cool, buttoned-up Synne Sørheim and heavy, ruddy-cheeked Torgeir Husby.

Both of them had clearly indicated that they were uncomfortable about meeting him. They said they were not in a position, either emotionally or
intellectually, to carry out the one-to-one interviews with him which would be the norm. They worried about potential hostage situations, they said, especially in the case of the female expert.

For the first eleven sessions he was in shackles and his left arm was fastened to an abdominal belt. He was placed in a corner with three conference tables between him and the two psychiatrists. There
were two prison guards in the room throughout. Interviews twelve and thirteen were conducted in the visiting room. On those occasions he was locked into a cubicle behind a glass wall while the experts, one for each session, sat on the other side of the glass. The guards were then on the outside.

For the first meeting he put on his striped Lacoste jersey in muted, earthy colours, the one he had
been wearing on the morning of his operation, when he took the getaway car to Hammersborg torg to park it and then walked through the government quarter under an umbrella in the drizzle.

The psychiatrists shook his hand. Then he was taken to his seat behind the three tables. In his right hand he had a piece of paper, which he put on the table in front of him. The first thing he said was that
every forensic psychiatrist in the world probably envied them the task of assessing him.

This produced no particular response, so he went on. He had a list of seven questions, which they had to answer before he would cooperate.

‘Why?’ asked the psychiatrists.

‘Well, I don’t want to contribute to my own character assassination, do I?’

The experts were not prepared to answer any questions. These
observations were to be done on their terms. The accused insisted he must know their view of the world before he could take part in the sessions. ‘If either of you is on the ideological left, you’re going to be biased,’ he asserted.

Arguments were tossed back and forth. Breivik said they would no doubt try to gag him. ‘The machinery of power is Marxist-orientated. After the war they sent Quisling’s
justice minister to the madhouse.’ Breivik repeated that he had to find out what they stood for before he gave them any answers.

Finally the forensic psychiatrists conceded. They asked him to state his questions. He read from the piece of paper.

‘The first is: What do you think about Knut Hamsun and the resignation of justice minister Sverre Risnæs after the Second World War? The second is:
Do you think all national Darwinists are psychopaths?’

The psychiatrists asked him to explain the term ‘national Darwinist’.

‘A Darwinist who’s a pragmatist. With a logical approach to political decisions. There are two approaches to a political problem: men are pragmatic, whereas women use their emotions to solve the problem. Darwinism views human beings from an animal perspective, sees things
as if through the eyes of an animal and acts accordingly,’ he said. ‘One example is when America bombed Japan. They employed a pragmatic approach. Better to kill three hundred thousand but save millions. We consider that to be suicidal humanism.’

‘Who are “we”?’

‘We, the Knights Templar.’

The experts asked him to go on with his list of questions.

‘Question number three is whether you think
the American military command lacks empathy. Question number four: Explain the essential distinctions between pragmatism and sociopathy.’

‘How do you interpret the word sociopathy?’ asked the psychiatrists.

Breivik smiled. ‘Isn’t it the same as psychopathy, then?’

He said the subsequent questions would be more personal in nature.

‘Question five: Are you nationalists or internationalists? Number
six: Do you support multiculturalism? Number seven: Have either of you had any connection with Marxist organisations?’

‘How will you judge whether we are telling the truth, if we answer your questions?’ they asked.

He grinned. ‘I already know. Thousands of hours as a salesman have taught me to predict with seventy per cent accuracy what the person I am talking to is thinking. So I know that
neither of you is of Marxist orientation, but you are both politically correct and support multiculturalism. It’s all I can expect.’

‘Do you guess, or do you know what other people are thinking?’

‘I know,’ said Breivik. ‘There’s a big difference.’

He said he had studied a great deal of psychology and was able, for example, to tell the difference between people from the east and the west end
of town by their clothes, make-up and watches.

At the end of the session he decided he would accept them. He looked at the experts and smiled.

‘I think I’ve been lucky.’

*   *   *

In the first ‘Status præsens’ that they wrote, Sørheim and Husby drew a number of conclusions. ‘The subject believes he knows what the people he is talking to are thinking. This phenomenon is judged to be founded
in psychosis,’ they wrote. ‘He presents himself as unique and the focal point of everything that happens, believing that all psychiatrists in the world envied the experts their task. He compares his situation to the treatment of Nazi traitors after the war. Indicative of grandiose ideas,’ they noted. ‘The subject clearly has no clear perception of his own identity as he shifts between referring to
himself in the singular and the plural,’ they concluded. ‘The subject uses words that he stresses he has invented himself, such as “national Darwinist”, “suicidal Marxist” and “suicidal humanism”. This phenomenon is judged to be one of neologism.’ Such ‘new words’ could be part of a psychosis.

At the end of the thirteen sessions, the psychiatrists concluded that Anders Behring Breivik suffered
from
paranoid schizophrenia
. They adopted the view that he was psychotic while carrying out the attacks, and that he was still psychotic when they were making their observations. He was therefore in criminal terms not responsible for his actions and should receive treatment rather than a sentence.

Breivik was permitted to read the report when it was submitted in November 2011. He said he thought
they were trying to make a fool of him. They called his compendium ‘banal, infantile and pathetically egocentric’, motivated by his ‘grandiose delusions about his own exceptional importance’. But they also described him as ‘intelligent rather than the opposite’.

He had boasted of having an extremely strong psyche, stronger than that of anyone else he had ever known. Otherwise he would never have
been able to carry out his attack on Utøya, he emphasised.

Then he started getting letters from supporters around Europe who felt he would serve their cause badly if he were deemed to be not accountable for his own actions. He suddenly understood what was at stake. He could be declared insane.

Then it would all fold.

The court could rob him of all honour. Judge him to be an idiot.

Just before
Christmas he rang Geir Lippestad, who was basing his preparations on the conclusions of the psychiatric report. He asked the lawyer to come and see him right away.

He had sounded worked up on the phone, so on 23 December Lippestad assembled the whole defence team – four people – and went to see him at Ila prison. They listened to him through the glass wall in the visiting room. Anders Behring
Breivik asked them to change strategy.

‘I want to be found accountable for my actions,’ he said.

*   *   *

The defendant was supported in this by those with the clearest grounds for hating him. Several next of kin and bereaved family members had been upset to hear that he might escape serving a formal sentence. Mette Yvonne Larsen, one of the coordinators of the public advocates’ group, asked
for another set of experts to be appointed so that the court would have two reports to compare. More and more of the public advocates began to press for a new assessment to be carried out.

The prosecution did not want it. They had already started their work based on the first report. Lippestad was against it. Breivik said he’d had enough of shrinks. There was also the risk that a second observation
would produce the same result as the first, thought Lippestad, making it even more difficult to advance the case in court that Breivik was of sound mind, as he now wanted to affirm.

‘It has never done a case any harm to shed some extra light on it,’ concluded Wenche Elizabeth Arntzen, the judge appointed by the court to lead these negotiations. She requested that two new forensic psychiatrists
be designated.

Norwegian forensic psychiatry circles are small, and many of the higher-profile experts were ruled out because they had already expressed their opinions in the media. But the court found Terje Tørrissen and Agnar Aspaas, who met the criteria of neither being close colleagues, nor having commented publicly on the case.

In addition to his conversations with the experts, Anders Behring
Breivik was now to be observed around the clock for four weeks. Early each morning a team of a dozen nurses, psychologists and auxiliary psychiatric nurses were to come and spend the day with him, talk to him, eat with him, play board games with him and then submit written reports, which the new pair of experts would have to take into account.

In mid-February 2012, two months before the trial
was to begin, the first session with the new forensic psychiatrists took place. Breivik asked for the interview to be recorded, so Lippestad could listen to it afterwards.

Terje Tørrissen was a short man with a furrowed brow and flyaway hair. He greeted Breivik, who entered the room flanked by two prison officers.

‘I want to inform you that we have not read the previous report,’ said Tørrissen,
speaking quietly in his lilting western Norwegian accent.

‘Well I’m extremely impressed that you’ve been able to restrain yourselves,’ smiled Breivik. ‘I didn’t think there was a psychiatrist left in the whole of Norway who hadn’t made some comment, as it’s very tempting in such an important case as this.’

Once Breivik had seen how he was being perceived in the media, he realised he had miscalculated
the impact his trappings of chivalry would make. The uniforms, the martyr’s gifts, the awards and decorations, the titles, even his language were ridiculed. He decided to tone down his rhetoric, referring to himself from then on as a foot soldier rather than a messiah.

‘Just to put you fully in the picture,’ he told Tørrissen, ‘I have never behaved threateningly to anyone, apart from a window
of three hours on the 22nd. I am polite and pleasant to everybody. The picture the media has constructed of me as a psychotic monster who eats babies for breakfast…’

He laughed. Tørrissen noted that the laugh was self-deprecating, reasonable and appropriate.

‘… is pure rubbish and there’s no need for you to be apprehensive about me. I look forward to our working together.’

Tørrissen asked him
about his conduct during the open committal hearing ten days earlier, when Breivik had made a short speech. It provoked laughter from AUF members in the hall when he declared himself a knight of the indigenous Norwegian people. He called the murders defensive attacks, undertaken in self-defence, and demanded his immediate release. The laughter spread as he spoke, and after a minute had passed the
judge halted him.

‘If you know me, you’ll realise that was just an act I put on,’ explained Breivik. ‘I am actually talking to a tiny group of people, a few thousand within Europe, though that number can grow. I know very well it’s a description of reality that’s wholly alien to most people. But it’s a show … I play my role. If I say I expect to be awarded the War Cross with Three Swords, I know
I’m not going to be, of course. And when I say I expect to be released immediately, I know that isn’t really going to happen either. I’m only following the path I’ve set out all along.’

‘But why not just be yourself?’

‘In a way I am myself, because I represent an entirely different picture of the world, which has been unknown since the Second World War. It exists in Japan and South Korea, but
it’s alien to a Marxist society.’

‘What you call a Marxist society is really more of a social democratic society, isn’t it?’

‘I don’t mind calling it a social democratic society. I can tell the two apart. But when I say cultural Marxist, that’s to be provocative. In a way, it’s a domination technique. They use such techniques on the left and they like calling other people obscurantists, so now
we’re using those tactics against the left. By the way, are you familiar with the seven questions I asked the previous experts?’

‘No, but you can ask me them now.’

‘When something big like 22 July happens in a country, it’s impossible not to be emotionally affected. The psychiatry profession has no experience of politically motivated aggressors, and that’s a major problem. You don’t know how
militant nationalists think, or how militant Islamists think, or for that matter how militant Marxists think. It’s a separate world that I think very few psychiatrists have any knowledge of. You weren’t taught about it at college, and I don’t know if there’s any additional professional training available either. Maybe you can tell me about that.’

Tørrissen could not. He replied that his mandate
was to find out whether the subject was ill; that is to say, whether he was suffering from a severe mental illness or not.

Psychiatry’s great weakness was that it had no response to religion or ideology, argued Breivik. ‘If it had been up to your profession, all priests would no doubt have been shut up in lunatic asylums because they had had a calling from God!’ he laughed, and described at some
length how Islamists prayed five times a day to become fearless warriors, and how they got to have sex with seventy-two virgins in Paradise if they were killed. For his part, he had used Bushido meditation. He said that this involved manipulating your own mind to suppress fear, but also other feelings. ‘That’s the reason I seem de-emotionalised. I couldn’t have survived otherwise.’