Lippe was probably never a Secret Service agent but it is not altogether surprising that such a suspicion should have been formed in Moscow in 1945. In that year he arrived in Finnmark as a Captain in the Norwegian security forces.(50) With his knowledge of Russian, he became an interpreter for the Norwegian military mission to the Soviet authorities. For a well-known pre-war leader of the NKP to return to Norway in 1945 as an officer in the security services was enough in itself to give rise to suspicion against him in international Communist circles. Only a few years previously, those circles had experienced the cloak-and-dagger atmosphere of the Moscow trials.

Emil Løvlien (1899-1973)(51) became a lumberjack at the age of 16 and joined the Labour Party at 18. Joining the NKP in 1923, he did a great deal to organise the forest workers in the 1920`s. In 1934 he suddenly became the party's General Secretary in what has been described as a palace revolution. Despite his training at the Lenin School in Moscow, few had expected him to be promoted to the party's leading post.

The background was that in 1933 a majority of the party leadership was opposed to the Comintern leadership(52) and later in the same year, Løvlien led the attack on the heretics, became the new political leader with the approval of the Comintern, and formally retained the post until Furubotn took over in the winter of 1941-42. As General Secretary, Løvlien worked hard for the party, and kept his private life above approach. Reliable and efficient, he was in many ways an excellent ``apparatchik'', but he lacked any ideological perspective of his own. In that respect he was typical of the new breed of party functionaries which the Comintern schools in Moscow were intended to turn out: streamlined, efficient, and loyal to the Soviet Union - and acquainted with the Soviet intelligence network in Norway.(53) In 1940 he, too, supported the Non-Aggression Pact policy. He was one of the many NKP leaders arrested on 16^th August 1940 and released after interrogation and a few days in prison. Like the others, he was allowed his freedom, for one thing because of his increasing passivity. At one time he even took a job as a gardener at the Horten naval shipyard, to the dismay of the underground party leadership under Furubotn. According to a number of oral sources, they were afraid it would compromise the party to have its former principal officer working for the Germans.(54)

Concerning what happened at this time, there is some disagreement among Løvlien's biographers. In the Pax leksikon, Irene Iversen claims that Løvlien went to Sweden in 1943, forced to flee from the Gestapo for having allegedly headed underground resistance work in the county of Hedmark.(55) It has also been argued that he went to Sweden because he was afraid of being murdered by Furubotn.(56) Thorkild Jacobsen probably comes closest to the truth.(57) He was in charge of the underground network which arranged for Løvlien's flight, and said that it was Løvlien' s inactivity and work for the Germans which had led him to Sweden. The two of them even quarrelled about this before Løvlien left. In 1948, they clashed in a party discussion of events in 1943. When Jacobsen reminded him of what had occurred, Løvlien exploded and refused to discuss the matter any further.

During his stay in Sweden from 1943 and until he returned to Norway in 1945, Løvlien was out of politics.(58) To those unfamiliar with the pre-war NKP, he appeared colourless and rather insignificant.(59) But as the leader of the NKP's eleven-man parliamentary party in the autumn of 1945, he soon won respect as a skilful and well-like parliamentarian.