Mediated Spies: Cold War Espionage Affairs in European Newspapers

This article explores how 13 mainstream newspapers in five countries (Norway, Sweden, BRD, DDR and UK) covered the first week of three high-profile spy affairs in the late Cold War: Arne Treholt (Norway), Geoffrey Prime (UK) and Günter Guillaume (BRD).

The Eastern European newspapers followed in their governments’ footsteps and prolonged the politics of silence. In the West, newspapers framed the espionage using an issue-specific cultural frame, the traitor. Stories are spiced up by irrelevant and false facts, inspired by the spy stories in the fiction media. The traitor frame is constructed in two variations: the single spy betraying his country and the government forsaking its people by being “soft on the Soviets” or “careless about security”. The study indicates no significant differences in coverage between the four Western countries or between the three espionage affairs.