Dutch man sabotaged Iranian nuclear program without Dutch government's knowledge

https://nltimes.nl/2024/01/08/dutch-man-sabotaged-iranian-nuclear-program-without-dutch-governments-knowledge-report

by yread • 3 years ago

55 76 3 years ago

i67vw32• 3 years ago

Van Sabben immediately left Iran after successfully sabotaging the country’s nuclear program, the researchers concluded. He died two weeks later in a motorcycle accident near his home in Dubai. Nothing points to foul play, the Volkskrant said after speaking with people at the crash scene.

Definitely killed by either Dutch/Americans/Saudis or Iranians.

cf12412908414• 3 years ago

It is unclear whether the Dutchman knew about his role in the sabotage operation, the Volkskrant wrote.

unsupp0rted• 3 years ago

An activity that accidentally kills a relatively huge % of people:

https://www.medpagetoday.com/transplantation/transplantation...

After Major Motorcycle Rallies, More Organs Available for Donation
— Study estimated 21% more organ donors, 26% more transplant recipients per day during rallies

ecmascript• 3 years ago

If the americans killed him it would be a great way to make sure less people are willing to help them in the first place.

protastus• 3 years ago

Or maybe he's alive and well under a new identity.

mithras2• 3 years ago

Seems unlikely Iran already figured it out within two weeks of the event.

andruby• 3 years ago

Dutch news seems to give different information.

The operation happened in 2007. 1.5 to 2 years later, Van Sabben returned to Iran. Then he suddenly left and two weeks later died on 16/01/2009.

https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/aivd-speelde-cr...

https://nos.nl/artikel/2504114-nederlander-saboteerde-atoomc...

The Dutch tech site tweakers.net is discussing it here https://tweakers.net/nieuws/217216/volkskrant-identiteit-van...

i67vw32• 3 years ago

I think he was a simple AVID informant who may have thought he had planted a audio/video recording device on behest of AVID and not the virus.

A local news outlet states that he was an 'avid motorcycle rider' meaning he was an expert at riding motorcycles. Such a rider has low chances of getting into an accident than average.

Or the accident was a mere coincidence.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/uae/engineer-who-helped-buil...

spaghetti1535• 3 years ago

I hope they can pull this of again. Not looking forward to a world where Iran has nuclear weapons

amingilani7• 3 years ago

I’m curious as to why that is. I understand that the regime is loathed by plenty but why should a portion of humanity be excluded from nuclear weapons when their enemies have it?

Genuinely asking because I’m curious, and not trying to flamebait.

Ygg2• 3 years ago

To answer your question with a question: What is so bad about giving a regime that (re)invented suicide bombings a nuke?

UberFly• 3 years ago

You are trying to flamebait. Why is the regime loathed by plenty?

ioblomov• 3 years ago

All politics aside, the more countries with nukes there are, the likelier one gets used, whether intentionally or by accident.

boeingUH604• 3 years ago

Nobody wants nuclear weapons in the hands of crazy Islamic extremists who have vowed to destroy their neighbor.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/hailing-hamas-iranian-presiden...

ben_w4• 3 years ago

I asked an Iranian coworker if the Iranian government is serious or if it's just a bad translation when we hear them call America and Israel "the Great Satan". Apparently they are entirely sincere about that.

WinstonSmith842• 3 years ago

If you're a random terrorist/military group and opposes the west, you will get automatically sponsorship from Iran. It's quite concerning what Iran would do if they had nukes

drdeca• 3 years ago

Because they should lose their conflicts, because they would do bad things if they won.

This isn’t like, a game, where we want all sides to have an equal chance of winning?

If a robber comes to your house armed with a knife, and you have a sword with good reach, you don’t toss the robber a sword out of some sense of sportsmanship.

t0mas883• 3 years ago

There is a difference between Russian and American deterrent use of nuclear weapons and a North Korean and Iranian wish to have nuclear weapons as a tactical option. Using nuclear weapons as a threat in international interactions is far crazier than the Russian / American self defence stance.

Still in principle I think we should strive for nobody to have nuclear weapons, but given that that is far away the next best thing is to not let any new actor add nuclear weapons to their arsenal.

cm21874• 3 years ago

Because they love to destabilize the region through their proxies. Look at their good work now: Yemen at war (they sponsor Houthi rebels), Israel at war (they sponsor Hamas and Hezbollah) and look at the state of Lebanon now (they also played a major role in Syria but I wouldn't say they were contributing to destabilising it, ISIS backers and the anti-Al Assad western coalition probably did more harm).

Iran can at least be pressured now with retaliations. Once it becomes a nuclear power, even the US will be forced to trade carefully.

Now some hope that nuclear armed states become "responsible" as a result of feeling safe, and don't sponsor terrorism. But that clearly didn't work with Pakistan (major backer of the talibans, and by extension of Al Quaeda) and North Korea (aggresses South Korea regularly and issues random threats to attract attention).

And nuclear deterrence only works when the parties do no want to die. When their religion tells them it's great to die for Jihad, I don't think their is any deterrence, it's a completely different dynamic.

And with ethnic tensions all over the middle east, and Iran's stated objective to destroy Israel, no one in the middle east is really keen to be threatened by Iran's nukes.

simion314• 3 years ago

I think that countries with an imperialistic or aggressive neighbor should have the nuclear weapon, but this countries should be democracies, otherwise an insane or fanatic dictator/regime can just use it even if it will wipe out his country since he might think they go to heaven and get their rewards there.

I understand that countries that already have their weapon do not want the smaller countries to get it, and a lot of people from big countries are OK if small countries get genocided if it prevent ww3 or if it keeps the bills down.

goestoo3• 3 years ago

The second Iran government has access to nuclear weapons, they're going to nuke Israel and that's not going to be the end of it! I remember watching the news a couple of years ago, The president of Iran at the time said we don't have any problem with the Israeli people, it's only the Israel government, the next day Iran's supreme leader said, Israeli people are also responsible and we condemn them! these people don't even care about their own people, in Iran's last protest, they basically killed thousands of high school and college kids!

fmajid2• 3 years ago

If the Iranians get the bomb, so will the Saudis, and that is a genuinely terrifying prospect.

cf12412908414• 3 years ago

Thats an harder and harder position to defend with ever week the civilian population in Gaza is treated the way it is.

The very sad and pragmatic truth might be that mutually assured destruction might have been able to prevent this.

Its especially bad since thats the way the Soviet Union got its nukes.

boeingUH604• 3 years ago

So you want Hamas to get nuclear weapons?

wkat42425• 3 years ago

Throwing gasoline into a fire is probably not the best thing.

panick21_• 3 years ago

Except you know, Iran wasn't actually developing nuclear weapons. They were not even building the infrastructure for enrichment. They had a deal with France to have nuclear power in Iran, France would handle all fuel handling. This whole activity would be fully monitored under the IAEA. Iran has the right to a civilian nuclear program and is signatory under the NPT.

Then the US used its political power to prevent any of that from happening. Only then did Iran slowly start to develop their own infrastructure.

Together with Israel the US started a huge political campaign trying to convince everybody that Iran was building nuclear weapons, despite there not being any evidence for that. It was pretty much the universal assessment of the CIA and friends that Iran didn't have a nuclear weapons program. In fact the only evidence ever found that there might be something came from Israel, that evidence was incredibly flimsy and many security services didn't accept it as real.

That Israel btw, who not only has been claiming Iran was 'just about to have nuclear weapons since the 90s'. Literally for 30 years, Iran has been 'just about about to have' nuclear weapons. And that the same Israel who IS NOT SIGNED TO NPT and has illegal nuclear weapons. They very likely have stolen nuclear secrets from the US and other countries.

Israel also is conducting a 'the US should invaded Iran' marketing campaign for 30 years. They only went along with Bush idiotic Iraq war because Bush wanted to go after Syria and Hezbollah after that (and eventually Iran). Remember when the US government also was spouting propaganda about WMD back then?

But by all means, lets freak out about Iran when there is a literal rough nuclear state in the region. Iran now is under the most advanced nuclear monitoring system in the history of humanity, and still people are freaking out about it. Talk about propaganda being effective.

But yes, we don't want anybody to have nuclear weapons, but and nuclear weapons could have been prevented by some basic diplomacy. Instead the US made the population of Iran suffer an incredibly amount, and caused billion in damages (not to mention infection lots of computers around the world). And Israel was busy assimilating any Iranian nuclear scientist they could find.

dannyw• 3 years ago

An anonymous executive at the AIVD said that the government may have deliberately not been informed of the operation due to the potential political consequences

Pretty bad when intelligence services customarily operate above the law and don't even tell the government they're supposedly beholden to.

checkyoursudo• 3 years ago

Pretty bad for the rest of us, but not bad for the people in government who want plausible deniability for actions taken by the espionage services. I would assume that every government has this, at least to some extent, don't you think?

cm21874• 3 years ago

Yes but this "independence" regularly leads to abuses. In France the secret services are strongly suspected to be behind several major political hoaxes against their president (Markovic affair against Pompidou, Japanese bank account against Chirac). I won't even get into what the CIA is suspected of...

turquoisevar2• 3 years ago

It would be great for governments, if that’s how it worked in European countries.

The Netherlands specifically had cabinets (i.e., governments) fall due to the responsible ministers not knowing what their agencies were doing, with snap elections as result.

In fact, in the last decade or so this happened quite often. Accountability in The Netherlands isn’t just based on knowing something and still doing the wrong things, its often also based on “should’ve known something as the person responsible for the agency in question” and not being in the know. In terms of accountability, in both cases the person in question is considered to have fucked up.

So the plausible deniability angle, is not really a benefit. Provided it comes out during that person’s tenure, although in rare instances even current office holders have been held responsible for the lack of knowledge of their prior office holders, based on the idea that the current office holder should’ve been aware such a thing happened and should’ve informed parliament post haste upon learning about it.

wkat42425• 3 years ago

I wonder if they really didn't know though.

There's not knowing and "not knowing". Plausible deniability and all.

pests• 3 years ago

It's kind of the point though.

pjmlp• 3 years ago

As the first generation after Portugal's dictorship, I think it is even worse how naïve people happen to be regarding intelligence services, even in democratic countries.

The whole point is to do the dirty work it isn't supposed to be happen.

t0mas883• 3 years ago

There is a podcast about how this works inside AIVD (civil intelligence) and MIVD (military intelligence) unfortunately it's in Dutch, but if you speak Dutch and are interested: https://open.spotify.com/show/6wZZ2ojf2XxwgfYT649wpO

They describe the process on how things can be approved and what needs to be done for that. But this thing sounds like it was more an MIVD (military) thing and I can imagine there isn't nearly as much legal due process on that side.

mithras2• 3 years ago

I listened to the first season in 2021 and enjoyed it. Seems there is a second season now, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

Would reccommend it for Dutch language speakers.

wkat42425• 3 years ago

According to the newspaper, the Stiekem committee, which translates to “secret committee,"

It doesn't translate to secret committee really. Secret = geheim in Dutch.

The term stiekem has a definite negative connotation. A more accurate translation would be the "sneaky committee"

pprotas• 3 years ago

To add on to that, it's a very "childish" word, something a little kid would say. It's like you did something without your mom's permission, implying a child-like sneakiness or mischievousness.

wkat42425• 3 years ago

Yeah it's not the official name for it anyway. Just the one busied by the parliament members. The official name is Commissie voor de Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdiensten (committee for the intelligence and security services). I'm not sure how the nickname even ended up in such a newspaper article.

I can kinda imagine they would leave significant multilateral geopolitical developments out of that by the way. There were many members in those days, including from small opposition parties. Maintaining secrecy would be difficult, especially since the Dutch parliament has a very bad track history (almost every year the "troonrede" - similar to the state of the union in the US) is leaked by someone beforehand.

These days they only seem to have 5 members from the biggest parties.

forcer• 3 years ago

After reading "According to the newspaper, the software cost over a billion dollars to develop" , I stopped. Can anyone believe that claim ?

moltar• 3 years ago

If a Payroll system can cost 2-3 billion (see phoenix Canada), which is basically a CRUD, ledger and business rules - something we’ve already done 1000s of times.

They probably add the costs of test equipment which I presume they had to procure and even destroy several times to make sure the virus worked.

mdhb• 3 years ago

I think you might be a bit hung up here on the word software which in your defence is not the correct word here.

Replace it with “operation” and it’s not at all a crazy number to suggest that an incredibly complicated multi year multi national intelligence operation to disrupt a covert nuclear weapons program inside of an actively hostile nation who have a serious counterintelligence and counter espionage apparatus ended up costing that amount.

You end up coming to the conclusion rather quickly that it’s actually great value for money.

While not at all about this particular operation but if you want to hear someone who actively ran another incredibly successful nuclear non proliferation operation inside of CIA I’d recommend checking out this interview with perhaps the “spookiest” CIA person I’ve ever seen https://www.youtube.com/live/AFnfTDbcPOA?

Dutch man sabotaged Iranian nuclear program without Dutch government's knowledge

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