Lists of resistors. Lists of collaborators. Quiet conversations with local business people. A search of history for grievances to stoke and pretexts to seize on.
The Nazi spies compiled all those things before they plunged Europe into war in 1939. Russia’s Federal Security Service gathered the same information in Ukraine before the invasions of 2014 and 2022.
Now, according to an explosive report, America is doing the same thing in Greenland and Denmark.
Donald Trump has long coveted the world’s largest island, which he regards as critical to protecting the American homeland, defending “international security” and securing a non-Chinese supply of vitally important rare-earth minerals.
But Denmark – and pro-independence Greenland politicians – have repeatedly rebuffed his offers to buy the semi-autonomous territory and veiled threats of invasion. Undeterred, the Americans now appear to be coupling public pressure with covert plots.
“What has been described to us by sources… is a clandestine or covert operation designed to create a kind of Greenlandic liberation movement that could tear apart the relationship between Denmark and Greenland, and thus pave the way for a US takeover of Greenland,” says Niels Fastrup, one of the reporters who broke the story on Wednesday for Danish public broadcaster DR.
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It is an extraordinary allegation with potentially mind-boggling implications for the pair of Nato allies. And it has been lent credence by Copenhagen’s response.
Instead of playing down the reports, the Danish foreign minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, summoned the American chargé d’affaires in Copenhagen, Mark Stroh – the top US diplomat in Denmark while Trump’s pick for ambassador awaits confirmation – for “preventative conversations”.
All of which suggests the Kingdom of Denmark thinks it may be facing a threat of invasion for the first time since the Second World War, and by a country that is meant to be its most important ally. Trump himself has refused to rule out using military force.
The Americans have played down the spat. A White House official on Thursday said the Danes should “calm down”.
But Fastrup and his colleague, Lisbeth Quass, say they have spent months investigating American activity in Greenland and uncovered indisputable skullduggery.
The story they published on Wednesday morning was based on exhaustive interviews with at least eight well-placed sources who identified “at least three” American men with connections to the US president believed to be engaged in covert activity.
The first man, they say, arrived in Greenland on a snowy day earlier this year on a mission to compile a list of Greenlandic citizens who support Trump’s plans to take over the island and who could be potential recruits to a secessionist movement across the territory and Denmark.
He also compiled a list of Greenlanders who might oppose such a takeover, they say. And at least one source told Fastrup and Quass that the man also asked locals for stories that could be used to cast Denmark in a poor light in US media (scandals that made the list included the sterilisation of indigenous women and the forced relocation of children for education in Denmark, both of which are real historic grievances).
Two other Americans are said to have held frequent meetings with local politicians and business leaders in an apparent attempt to build relationships that could be leveraged in the event of an American takeover.
The reporters have so far refused to name any of the suspects and have withheld certain details, including the specific behaviour that points to covert rather than legitimate activity, for security reasons.
“Every piece of information that you put out in your reporting, it contains like a small flag on top of it for the right people, allowing them to start guessing who the source [of] this piece of information could be, so we very carefully considered what we could put out and what we couldn’t put out at the moment,” says Fastrup. “I hope to be able to put out more details later.”
He declined to comment when asked if he and Quass had approached the men in question for comment, or whether the Danish authorities had spoken to the individuals.
But, he says, there is absolutely no doubt about their activities. This is not a case of glimpsing a possible, but difficult to prove, ulterior motive behind legitimate business activity or diplomacy; it is a matter of clear and unambiguous “covert activity” aimed at what sources called “‘infiltration’ of Greenlandic society.”
The American-influence operation is no secret among Greenland watchers, says Ulrik Pram Gad, associate professor of Arctic Culture and Politics at Aalborg University.
“Whenever they try to do influence operations, the general answer is, ‘We do not want to be Americans’. If there is some kind of sense to what is going on they would be trying to exploit fissures in Greenlandic society or grievances between Denmark and Greenland, and exaggerate them for an election three years down the road.”
Even that, he says, would be a long shot. In Greenland, opinion polls show both huge support for eventual independence from Denmark, and overwhelming opposition to an American takeover.
But DR’s sources, Pram suspects, may have spoken out to make the Danish and Greenlandic publics aware that “the amateurish efforts that they have seen so far may be about to become more professional.”
In May, the American ambassador in Copenhagen was summoned after the Wall Street Journal reported that American intelligence agencies, including the CIA, had been ordered to step up their efforts to gather intelligence regarding Greenland.
The WSJ report referred to directives to learn more about Greenland’s independence movement and attitudes on American resource extraction on the island, and to identify people in Greenland and Denmark who supported the Trump administration’s objectives for the island.
Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, at the time accused the newspaper of “aiding deep-state actors who seek to undermine the president by politicising and leaking classified information”, but did not deny the allegation.
Fastrup and Quass say they have been unable to establish any link between American intelligence agencies and the individuals they claim to have identified – yet. Nor have they been able to work out whether the men are acting on instructions from Trump, other administration officials, or at their own initiative.
“Obviously this is part of the hypothesis that we are investigating,” Fastrup says. He emphasises that he is in no position, at this point, to draw such conclusions.
The reporters have published enough clues about the Americans’ identities to spark a guessing game, however.
The man charged with compiling lists of potential collaborators and resistors, for example, has appeared frequently in public with the US president and has recently been appointed “to a role that can give him influence on US security policy,” they say.
The other two, who allegedly nurtured contacts with local politicians, business people and residents, both previously worked for Trump and have regularly travelled between Greenland and the United States in recent years.
Several individuals with ties to the president have been active in Greenland in recent months.
They include Drew Horn, a former Green Beret who is the chief executive officer of GreenMet, a Washington-based company that hopes to profit from the administration’s drive to end America’s dependence on China for imports of critical minerals.
There is nothing covert about Horn’s trips to Greenland. Earlier this month he was the subject of an extensive profile by Bloomberg, which described him as “a key middleman” in Trump’s campaign to access the island’s natural resources.
The article described how he briefed the US president on his findings after scouting a rare-earth metals deposit in southern Greenland in April this year.
The Telegraph asked GreenMet and Horn for comment, but received no response by the time of publication. There is no suggestion that he is one of the individuals identified in the DR report.
Another American who has prominent links to Greenland is Thomas Emanuel Dans, a businessman who briefly served as a US Arctic commissioner in Trump’s first term.
Dans has no role in the current administration, but he is the founder of American Daybreak, a non-profit that promotes America-Greenland ties and which was involved in organising vice-president JD Vance and second lady Usha Vance’s visit to Greenland in March.
The Greenland director for American Daybreak is Jorgen Boassen, a former bricklayer from the south of the island who has become the most prominent local advocate for closer ties with America – although he stops short of advocating an annexation.
Both have been public in their views and there is no suggestion that either of them is among the individuals accused of conducting covert subversion operations in the DR report. The Telegraph reached out to Dans for comment, but received no reply before publication.
Much is yet to emerge. The Telegraph could not immediately independently confirm DR’s reporting. It is not even clear how viable a plot to destabilise Greenland and Denmark from within would be.
Since a brief invasion scare in March when US military aircraft flew into Nuuk ahead of the Vance visit, Greenlanders have made dark jokes about how many hunting rifles they have at home.
In mainland Denmark, reports of collaborators and resistors have stirred memories of the Nazi occupation in the Second World War.
And the Danish government has signalled that it will not mess around when it comes to defending the Kingdom’s border.
“This took months of hard investigative reporting. It was not in any way handed to us by the Danish government, not at all, but the moment we were able to break the story, they were eager to comment,” says Fastrup.
“I would say that’s because they wanted to send a very strong signal to the Americans, the Americans active in Greenland and also to the American government, that what is going on is not acceptable in any way.”
