OR MAYBE IT'S A MARKETING PLOY FOR "OCCUPIED":

KIRKENES, Norway

Frode Berg volunteered in a soup kitchen in rural Russia. He helped organize an annual cross-border festival and ski race. His congregation supported a new church in a Russian town just over the boundary line that divides East from West.

Then the Russians arrested him and accused him of being a spy.

That an espionage mystery is unfolding here on the Arctic frontier confounds residents who didn't expect to be swept up in the confrontation between Russia and the West. On the snowbound shore of an icy fjord, a three-decade experiment in building cross-border ties independent of geopolitics now hangs in the balance.

Accusations that a retired border inspector was spying have jolted Kirkenes, Norway.

No one in this Barents Sea port town, a 15-minute drive from the Russian border, seems to know why the police arrested Berg, a 62-year-old retired border inspector, near Moscow's Red Square in December. His lawyers say Berg stands accused of mailing envelopes with cash and spy instructions addressed to a Moscow woman named Natalia and now faces a virtually certain espionage conviction.

"I can guarantee you that he is not a spy," said Kirkenes Mayor Rune Rafaelsen. "What I'm wondering is, has someone used him?"

The case has received scant international attention, in part because the Norwegian government has resisted the entreaties of Berg's friends to bring more public pressure to bear on the Kremlin. But it has jolted Kirkenes, where residents say that Berg personified this remote region's efforts to foster bonds even after geopolitical tensions spiked in recent years.

Did Russian spies set up Berg to provoke an international incident with Norway, a front-line member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization?

Did Norwegian intelligence use Berg as an unwitting courier in an operation gone wrong? Or -- in a scenario that Berg's friends categorically rule out -- did he truly lead some kind of double life?

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