U.S.-Iran Nuclear Talks a Magnet for Spies
Bugs, wiretaps, hotel spies, code-breakers, secret agents will be dispatched to find out what the diplomats say in private.
If history and tradition hold, U.S. and Iranian spies will be hard at work trying to crack the secrets of the other side’s diplomatic strategies during the nuclear talks set to open Saturday in Oman.
Each side’s espionage operations will range from efforts to bug meeting places and hotel rooms, to eavesdropping on diplomats’ phones, to piercing coded messages between delegates and their ministries back home, to bribing restaurant waiters to report on loose talk over dinner out in cosmopolitan Muscat, the capital.
Nobody should be surprised by that, said two knowledgeable former senior U.S. officials.
“This is standard operating procedure,” said one, a longtime veteran of Middle East intelligence operations, speaking on terms of anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject. “And, you know, we do it with everybody,” he added.
“I remember that we did this during the Panama Canal treaty negotiations,” he said. “We did it through a variety of Central America peace talks …We did it with the Russians all the time.”
Another former top intelligence official said the same, calling the talks “a spy versus spy kind of situation.”
The United States and Iran have used Oman as an interlocutor for years. In 2012 and 2013, Muscat was the site of secret talks under President Barack Obama that led to the 2015 nuclear agreement that capped Tehran’s enrichment of uranium. In 2018, Donald Trump scuttled the deal, and his successor Joe Biden failed to jumpstart talks as Iran reverted to enriching uranium. Now, under the growing threat of combined U.S. and Israeli air and missile attacks on its nuclear facilities, Iran has agreed to new talks—albeit indirect, with Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi insisting on using Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad al-Busaidi to pass messages between him and U.S. Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff. Iran has reportedly agreed to Trump’s demand for direct talks if initial discussions prove promising.
Meanwhile, the Iranians and Americans won’t be the only intelligence agencies trying to ferret out what’s going on. The conference will draw other spies like flies to honey.
“The Omanis will be doing it. The Israelis will be doing it. The Brits will be doing it,” said one of the former U.S. intelligence officials. “There'll be a lot of shit going down,” he chuckled. “Everybody's interested in this. And even our allies no longer trust us to tell them everything that's going on. So they're gonna want to do their own unilateral collection.”
As soon as the talks were announced, various spy teams were almost certainly at work assessing where they might plant sophisticated bugs—in ceilings, light fixtures, radios and smart TVs.
“Your best option, which is going to be very difficult, because it seldom works, is to do some kind of close access attack on communications. They will, I'm assuming, try to put stuff inside the conference rooms, to try to pick up, you know, people whispering in each other's ears.” There are devices that can “send a sonic beam and suck off the sound from glass that vibrates in the rooms.”
Cell phones are a quick and easy target (something top Trump national security officials failed to recognize when they discussed Yemen war plans on theirs).
“Despite everybody knowing cell phones are weak, people are gonna use them,” said one of the former intelligence officials who spoke with SpyTalk. “You may get a guy calling home just to tell his wife, ‘Hey, I'll be home, it's going hard, it's going well, whatever,’ which can give you sort of an indication” of how the other side sees Oman talks going. But intercepts like that typically pick up only “30 percent of what you need,” the source said. Cracking the opposition’s diplomatic code, it hardly needs saying, is far better. Better still: a spy, if not in the delegation visiting Oman for the talks, then back home. For the Iranians, that would be a mole in the U.S. State Department; for the U.S., a secret agent in Iran’s Foreign Ministry.
“They're very good,” said the other former U.S. intelligence official, who has close and recent knowledge of Iranian espionage, terrorist and counterintelligence operations. “Top notch.”
“This is standard operating procedure,” said a longtime veteran of Middle East intelligence operations. “And, you know, we do it with everybody,” he added.
“I don't know how they are technically, but as a professional intelligence service, they're very good. They are trained like we are, they're capable like we are, with good and bad officers alike. Their counterintelligence”—the ability to uncover traitors—”is probably better than ours,” the former official said.
Iranian mole hunters long ago launched intensive and wide ranging operations to uncover the spies who had infiltrated their nuclear program. Starting with a study of who had what kinds of access, they quickly narrowed the field down to “who travels, who has money, who has gone on unexplained trips and this kind of stuff,“ the former official said. And that brought the sample size down from about a thousand to about a hundred people—a number ”easy for them to start monitoring” via “keystroke monitoring on laptops and computers…looking at cell phone use, travel use, all this kind of stuff. And bingo”—they rolled up “the Israeli and British [penetration] of the nuclear program.”
It’s been widely reported that Iran rolled up dozens of CIA assets in the 1980s, and several more between 2009 and 2015. As recently as February, Tehran claimed it had busted another U.S. spy ring. Likewise, the U.S. has arrested a number of Iranian spies here over the years.
But the Iranians won’t need a mole to get at least a glimmer of what the Americans in Muscat are thinking. Just a devious waiter and a diplomat’s lips loosened by a good bottle of wine will do.
“I can tell you from experience it’s easy to basically recruit any of the people that work in the hotels to help you out,” one of the former U.S. intelligence officials, who has over 30 years in the spy business, told SpyTalk. It’s possible, though, she said, that Trump, who has little faith in the CIA, will not want to risk wrecking the talks by going overboard and getting caught.
Then again, “You know, certainly there's gonna be people going out to dinner and talking too loud and things like that,” she said. “They’re briefed on not talking about secrets, but that doesn't mean they don't, because they'll feel like, you know, hey, I'm at this restaurant, I feel fine.” And someone will be listening.
Love the Spy vs Spy graphic. 😁