Crime on Monday evening at BNNVARA. The intimate, personal and bloody murder of a 21-year-old gay student in the American university town of Laramie. The perpetrators: two fellow students of the same age. And the large-scale, impersonal, digital stick between the spokes to disable an Iranian nuclear power plant. The perpetrators: the secret services of the United States and Israel plus, tamteradam, a Dutch AIVD agent. A hate crime and a cybercrimeeach with enormous consequences.
Journalist Huib Modderkolk opened the evening with Nobody sees itwhere we see the footage of whatever’s in on Monday de Volkskrant was standing. In the four-part TV series, Modderkolk is followed in his search for the Dutch agent who personally introduced a USB stick with a devastating computer virus into the nuclear power plant in Natanz, near Tehran, in 2007. Within no time, half of the equipment malfunctioned, causing Iran to delay the development of nuclear weapons for months.
Director Mea Dols de Jong films Huib Modderkolk as every journalist would prefer to see himself. Calling sources, sparring with the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, thinking, contemplating, talking to leaders of the secret services. All mobile phones in a safe, the cables from the TV, the curtains closed. Sometimes he is criticized and someone refuses to say anything, sometimes he achieves a small success, sometimes he walks into someone else’s trap with his eyes open. It’s either you go to Oppenheimer, James Bond and News hour watching at the same time.
The layer beneath Modderkolk’s quest is a disturbing one. The underlying thesis is that the first large-scale cyber attack on the Iranian nuclear power plant began a new type of warfare. One that you don’t immediately notice, but that still makes victims. The editorial staff of the Ukrainian newspaper Ukraine Pravda was already bombarded with tanks by hackers who shut down the site years before the invasion. Now that it is officially war, the power supply is more often not working, the internet is faltering, telephone traffic is down, and no citizen can get the heating to work. The new war is invisible but terribly palpable.
In search of the Dutch mole who brought the virus into the nuclear power plant, Modderkolk encounters a reluctant Israeli general who does not want to say anything and tries to brush him off. “Most stories told in the public domain are not true.” I hate to agree with him, but he has a point. The ‘truth’ is often different from what you hear, see or read. Not that lies are deliberately spread, but once ‘facts’ and stories start circulating, no one usually checks whether they are correct.
More complicated
After a two-year absence, Margriet van der Linden returned to TV on Monday with State of hate. She travels to America, where she lived and worked as a correspondent in the late 1990s. Four major murder cases, widely reported in the media, made an impression on her at the time and she goes back 25 years later to look for traces of those hate crimes. This is how the media labeled the murders committed against someone because who is or thinks ‘different’. 21-year-old Matthew Shepard was homosexual, and that orientation is said to have prompted his two killers to leave him half-dead in a field, tied to a fence. The murder went down in history as a homophobic hate murder. Half of America was furious with the homophobes, the gay haters took it up a notch and President Obama promised stricter laws to punish hate crimes.
Only, was homophobia really the motive? Was it a hate crime? That was of course much more complex and nuanced. As with any mediagenic story.