In the last two years, there had been repeated leaks that some of the best intelligence on the Iranian nuclear program was coming from Germany, which was explained as one reason the Europeans (and Germany in particular) were leading the diplomatic offensive against Tehran and letting the US take a back seat in negotiations.
It turns out that a key source of intelligence for the BND, Germany’s intelligence service, was coming from a rather dodgy businessman who has just been arrested for smuggling key technology into… wait for it… Iran. Der Spiegel has published the first story on the case, and I am reproducing a full BBC Monitoring translation after the jump. First some choice excerpts:
His colleagues know the businessman from Iran as manager of a medium-sized company based in Hesse: a dignified gentleman, 61 years of age, who had just returned from a trip abroad.
The customs officers know him as a smuggler of armaments technology for Iran – this, at least, is the suspicion that has now landed him in pre-trial detention.
The BND knows him as “Sinbad.” This was the cover name under which he spied for the German foreign intelligence service for more than a decade.
. . .
The documents that Sinbad supplied came obviously from the holy of holies of the state apparatus in Tehran. He obtained pictures of tunnel rock drills, details of secret deposits, and up-to-date documents on progress in developing carrier technology for nuclear warheads. The information must have come mainly from ministries in Tehran to which he had excellent access. In Pullach, where Department 1 is based that supervised Sinbad, and in Berlin, where the analysts of Department 3 processed Sinbad’s information, everyone was thrilled. What the source from Tehran served up went together well with the fragments that the BND obtained from other sources.
As a result, a relationship of mutual trust developed between the BND and its spy in the mid-1990s, when their cooperation began. The BND paid its top spy about 1 million euros, an unusually high amount that is invested only in exceptional cases. He was, an officer said, “one of our best-quality sources in the area of proliferation in general.”
Apparently “Sinbad” was delivering technology for use in delivery systems — the Shahab series of missiles unveiled by Iran in recent years and that are a more plausible medium-term threat/deterrent against Israel and US allies (or installations) in the region, even if they don’t carry a nuclear payload. So perhaps the Iranians very well knew who they were dealing with, giving him info on a nuclear program they know they won’t be able to complete in the near-future anyway, in exchange for making progress on building a more effective deterrent against a US/Israeli preemptive strike on the nuclear program. If you can deter and project strength effectively, after all, then you can afford to take the time on the nuclear program anyway.
Continue reading Sinbad The Spy