Officials at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo have hired international experts to help them track down who or what seems to have been spying on them. They suspect someone knew in advance who would be winning the Nobel Peace Prize, since the odds in favour of Maria Corina Machado shot up the night before the prize was announced.
“We have begun work to investigate this,” Kristian Berg Harpviken, director of the Nobel Institute, told news bureau NTB during the weekend. “We don’t have a major information technology staff at the Nobel Institute, so we have already asked several external experts to help us.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced on Friday that Machado had won the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025, for her efforts to restore democracy and free elections in Venezuela. Machado’s name had hardly come up in speculation over who might win the prize and the odds in her favour were very low, only around 3 percent according to Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK).
On Thursday night, however, her odds suddenly shot up at international betting firms, and her chances of winning were logged at nearly 70 percent. The committee’s decision came as a surprise to many, but now it seems someone knew in advance that Machado would win.
Harpviken has since dismissed any internal leaks and thinks the Nobel Institute was instead hit by cyber espionage. “We can dream that this was a coincidence,” Harpviken told NTB, “but the probability of that is very low. We think someone got hold of information.” Such information could then be used for economic gain, but Harpviken isn’t ruling out political motivation. “It’s no secret that the Nobel Institute is a target of systematic espionage,” Harpviken told NRK.
Harpviken took over as Nobel director at the beginning of this year and was thus making his public debut on announcement day. As the former head of the Oslo-based peace research institute PRIO, however, he has spent years speculating over Peace Prize candidates himself and creating lists of those deemed most worthy.
He wouldn’t identify who’s been hired in to investigate the alleged spying. He insisted, meanwhile that the Nobel Institute strives for the highest level of security regarding its information, “and works all the time to update our digital systems and routines.”
NewsinEnglish.no/Nina Berglund
