Iran Carefully Examining Reports of Dutch Role in Cyber-Attack
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Iran’s Foreign Ministry has expressed concern about reports of the Dutch intelligence agency’s involvement in a cyber-attack on the country’s Natanz nuclear site back in 2007, the ministry’s spokesman said.
“This report is being carefully examined by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and by our country’s Embassy in the Netherlands,” Abbas Mousavi said on Tuesday, in response to a report by Yahoo News that the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD had been involved in an act of sabotage against Iran’s Natanz nuclear site with the Stuxnet virus.
“In this regard, Director General for Western Europe of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had a meeting this morning (September 3, 2019) with Deputy Directorate General for Political Affairs of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who is Tehran in an already arranged trip, and expressed the Islamic Republic’s concern and sensitivity in the meeting with the Dutch delegation and that country’s ambassador to Tehran, while the Dutch delegation, in response, has declared that it would convey the issue to the government of the Netherlands,” Mousavi added.
On Monday, Yahoo News quoted unnamed sources as saying that Dutch intelligence agents had recruited an inside mole at the behest of the CIA and Mossad to get their Stuxnet virus onto computer systems inside Iran’s Natanz nuclear site.
According to the report, an Iranian engineer recruited by the Dutch intelligence agency AIVD provided critical data that helped the US developers target their code to the systems at Natanz.
The Dutch were asked in 2004 to help the CIA and Mossad get access to the plant, but it wasn’t until three years later that the mole, who posed as a mechanic working for a front company doing work at Natanz, delivered the digital weapon to the targeted systems, said the report, quoting one of the sources as saying, “(T)he Dutch mole was the most important way of getting the virus into Natanz.”
