The House of Representatives wants clarification about a sabotage action in Iran. The AIVD is said to have been involved in the infiltration of a nuclear factory without the cabinet knowing about it, according to reports de Volkskrant. Dutch engineer Erik van Sabben, recruited by the AIVD intelligence service, is said to have played a leading role in the sabotage of Iran’s nuclear weapons program in 2007 by smuggling a virus into a nuclear complex in Iran.
Former supervisor of the secret services Bert Hubert believes that the case exposes a flaw in the intelligence services system. “At the moment, the AIVD is allowed to take far-reaching actions without anyone in The Hague having to know about it. And that shouldn’t be possible.”
What happened?
“We don’t know exactly. Or the AIVD merely referred the Americans to a Dutch agent. Such an agent is not an exclusive AIVD employee, he or she can work for multiple parties. In that case, the AIVD itself has little to do with it. Or the AIVD itself asked the agent for this operation. Then, according to its rules, the AIVD does not have to inform the minister about this.”
Why not?
“In principle, the AIVD is only there to collect intelligence. The Intelligence Services Act contains only one article that gives the services the opportunity to do something themselves. According to Article 73, the service itself may take ‘measures’ to promote Dutch interests. On that basis, the service could carry out operations similar to those in Iran. But the strange thing is: the AIVD does not require permission from the minister for actions based on this article. The head of the AIVD department may give permission, or even leave that to unit managers.”
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Didn’t even the AIVD know anything about it?
How did that happen?
“When this article was first included in the then law in 2001, there was debate about whether there should be restrictions on it. This was deliberately not done because the AIVD wanted the freedom to break the law. The House then said: okay, no restrictions will be imposed, except that the AIVD may not kill anyone with this article in hand. After that, the article was snowed under and no one ever brought it up again.”
Why should the minister decide on these types of operations?
“So that an AIVD officer with strange ideas cannot go about his business alone. If such a person sabotages things in another country, this can have major consequences. Perhaps this will cause the Netherlands to come into conflict with that country. That is why a political assessment must always be made in advance.”
What do we know about the reasons why the AIVD uses this article of law?
“Officially we don’t know anything about that. But in an informal discussion, the AIVD indicated some time ago that it would use this article to neutralize hackers’ servers. It is understandable that they do that, but the minister would have to decide on that. And that’s not necessary now. It leads to the contradictory situation that there are numerous safeguards for hacking operations, but not for sabotage actions. If the service hacks a server just to watch what happens, it must first go through the minister and the review committee. But if you want to destroy that same server, you don’t need permission. That is a very strange situation.”