Iran urges Austrians, Swiss to secure nuke talks against spying
Tehran concerned by reports of cyber-breaches at venues linked to negotiations, which Iran attributes to Israel
Iran urged the Austrian and Swiss government to secure future nuclear talks between the six world powers and Tehran on their respective soils, after several cyber-breaches, attributed to Israel, were reported at venues linked to the talks.
Israel has denied involvement.
The Iranian Foreign Ministry sent a letter to the two governments, that each hosted several rounds of negotiations between the P5+1 and Iran over the past year.
Iran asked Austria and Switzerland to “to take whatever measures necessary to provide security, including cyber-security, for the venue of the talks,” according to the semi-official Fars news agency.
Iran’s embassies in Vienna and Bern expressed their government’s “serious concern” over the alleged breaches, currently being investigated separately in the respective European countries.
On Friday, Iran’s envoy to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Reza Najafi, said that Israel’s alleged involvement was not unexpected.
“The nuclear negotiations have enemies, specially the Zionist regime that does not want the talks to succeed. Owing to the same fact, they would spare no efforts and their spying was and is not an unexpected issue,” Najafi was quoted by Fars as saying.
The investigations come as the clock ticks down to a June 30 deadline for an accord between Iran and world powers.
Iran and the P5+1 group (Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States and Germany) have held numerous rounds of discussion since November 2013, mostly in Switzerland and Austria.
Deputy ministers and experts from both sides were now in Vienna seeking to clinch a deal that curtails Tehran’s nuclear program in return for relief from the punishing sanctions.
On Thursday, Swiss and Austrian authorities said investigators launched probes into the alleged spying in venues hosting the delicate nuclear talks.
The Swiss attorney general’s office confirmed it had launched an investigation on May 6 following a report from the Swiss intelligence agency. The office conducted a raid six days later, seizing computer equipment in which unspecified information technology material was seized, due to “suspicion of illegal intelligence services operating in Switzerland.”
It did not specify if hotels were targeted in the probe.
“The aim of this raid was on one hand to gather evidence and on the other to verify if information systems had been infected by malware,” the attorney general’s office said in an email.
Israel has lobbied against the deal as it stands, but denied spying on the talks. On Thursday, Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely told Army Radio there was “no basis” to the reports of Israel’s involvement.
“What is much more important is that we prevent a bad agreement, otherwise at the end of the day we’ll find ourselves with an Iranian nuclear umbrella,” she said.
Recent talks in Geneva held at the luxury Intercontinental Hotel failed to bridge differences between Washington and Tehran, especially over the crucial issue of inspections of military sites.
The talks between Iran and the world powers have been held in several Swiss hotels: the Palais Wilson and Intercontinental in Geneva, the Beau Rivage in Lausanne and the Royal Plaza in Montreux.
Thursday’s announcement came after Russian-based security firm Kaspersky said Wednesday the malware dubbed Duqu, which is a sophisticated spy tool that was believed to have been eradicated in 2012, appeared to have been used to spy on nuclear negotiations with Iran.
The virus allows the hacker to eavesdrop on conversations and steal electronic files, and could also enable the hacker to operate two-way microphones in hotel elevators, computers and alarm systems, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The Journal also quoted “current and former US officials and many cybersecurity experts (as believing that) Duqu was designed to carry out Israel’s most sensitive intelligence-collection operations.”
Kaspersky never implicates Israel by name in its report. However, it does conclude the threat came from the same source as the original Duqu virus, and says it was likely carried out by a nation-state.
In an interview with Israel Radio on Wednesday, Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Eli Ben-Dahan flatly rejected the allegations, calling them “nonsense,” and assured the interviewer that Israel had other ways of gathering intelligence and didn’t need to resort to hacking.
