In Case You Missed It: "Group Keeps Long-Distance Watch on Iran and Possible Sanction Violations"
UANI and MINERVA Profiled in Sunday's New York Times
"A Privately Financed Advocacy Group Founded by Former American Diplomats that Has Become an Annoying Thorn to Iran"
Group Keeps Long-Distance Watch on Iran and Possible Sanction Violations
By Rick Gladstone
June 23, 2013
Inside a nondescript Midtown Manhattan office, a couple of computer analysts spend their days peering intently at large screens of satellite mapping surveillance data, watching dozens of little blips moving like snails. Each one, they said, represents a ship controlled by Iran or its trading partners.
They said they were looking for suspicious behavior.
The analysts work for United Against Nuclear Iran, a privately financed advocacy group founded by former American diplomats that has become an annoying thorn to Iran, which regards it as a vigilante extension of a hostile American foreign policy. The group's latest effort is its maritime monitoring system, which it says provides a new level of scrutiny of compliance with the sanctions imposed on Iran by the West because of Iran's disputed nuclear energy program.
Although the economic and trade sanctions, including a European oil embargo, have deeply hurt Iran, the country has been somewhat successful in finding ways to evade them, the group says. A litany of clever tactics for cloaking commerce on the high seas has included reflagging, renaming or clandestinely acquiring ships, engaging in secretive ship-to-ship transfers to mask the origins of oil or other contraband, temporarily disabling onboard satellite transponders to hide their true locations or simply transmitting false destinations.
"Iran thrives on deception and disguise," said Mark D. Wallace, the chief executive of United Against Nuclear Iran, who would like to see a maritime blockade.
Mr. Wallace said the recent Iranian presidential election, in which a cleric and former nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, was elected on a campaign promoting better relations with the outside world, had done nothing to alter his group's view. "The regime has shown that it plans more of the same," he said in a statement on the group's Web site. "The world's response should therefore remain the same - the continued isolation of Iran and comprehensive sanctions."
Short of a blockade, he said in an interview, the maritime monitoring system, which has been in operation for about five months, has at least given Iran a new reason to worry.
"It's a technology-based advocacy tool," he said. "This technology and our monitoring allows us to expose sanctions-avoidance schemes."
Martin House, the monitoring system's director and lead analyst, said it used publicly available satellite transmissions from ship transponders, including data on speed, identity, direction and destination, and correlated the information with other navigational data and computer algorithms. He said the system created vessel behavior profiles that could identify questionable activities even if the transponders were temporarily turned off.
Several times, Mr. Wallace and his aides said, the system had exposed possible sanctions violations that the group had then publicized, forcing the Iranians or their partners to change plans.
In April, for example, an Iranian tanker sailing under a Tanzanian flag had to abandon a planned voyage to Malta, which has pledged compliance with the sanctions. Warned by Mr. Wallace's group that it was a blacklisted vessel, the Maltese government informed the ship that it was not welcome, he said.
In another recent episode, the monitoring system showed that three vessels operated by Medallion Reederei GmbH, a German shipping company, had visited Iranian ports operated by Tidewater Middle East Company, a sanctioned Iranian port management company. After Mr. Wallace wrote to the shipper expressing concern, its managing director, Falk Holtmann, sent a letter assuring him he was looking into the port calls and would "not tolerate any breach of international sanctions."
Other instances of what the group considered suspicious behavior discovered by its monitoring system have included mysterious linkups in the Red Sea between the Iranian bulk-carrier vessel Parisan and other vessels from Iran, Egypt and Turkey; and a curious anchoring of three old tankers near Singapore, nominally owned by a Greek shipper, that Iran may be using to store and transfer embargoed oil. The Greek shipper, Dimitris Cambis, was recently blacklisted by the Treasury Department for helping Iran evade sanctions.
"We're not the only people in the world with this information," said Nathan Carleton, a spokesman for United Against Nuclear Iran. "The Treasury and State Departments are following this, too. But there wasn't anyone analyzing this in total. We really feel like watch people."
Some maritime experts said the group's monitoring system could also misidentify innocent activity as suspicious behavior. The transponders that commercial ships are required to use to signal their location, for example, can sometimes appear to be switched off in areas where reception is poor, which is sometimes the case in the Red Sea. A crew can forget to update a ship's transmission data on destinations or cargo when plans change, but that is not necessarily a deliberate deception.
Richard Hurley, a senior data analyst in London for IHS Fairplay, a global information company that tracks shipping, said it would be unusual for large tankers, including Iran's, to disable their transponders deliberately, unless they were anchored near their home ports. The transponders' main purpose, he said, is to help minimize the possibility of collision.
"If you're running a big tanker, obviously safety is paramount; you really don't want an accident," he said. "We think we know where most of Iran's fleet is most of the time."
United Against Nuclear Iran's monitoring system, called Minerva (an acronym for Marine Intelligence Network and Rogue Vessel Analysis) is one of many tools used by the group in an increasingly aggressive campaign.
The group, formed in 2008 by Mr. Wallace and other prominent American diplomats including Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke, who died in 2010, has claimed success for persuading dozens of multinational corporations to stop doing business with Iran. It was also among the first to pressure Swift, a global banking communications consortium, to expel sanctioned Iranian financial institutions last year.
Registered as a nonprofit tax-exempt advocacy organization, the group relies on private donations and fund-raising to operate, according to its Web site. The group's officials declined to identify the donors but said its annual budget was about $1.5 million.
For Iran, which says its nuclear program is peaceful and considers the sanctions illegal, the group is just another extension of what it sees as hostile and arrogant American government behavior, contradicting President Obama's pledge to improve relations when he first took office.
Alireza Miryousefi, a spokesman for Iran's United Nations mission, noted that the group's founders had "worked within or were close to the U.S. government" and that Iran considered it "counterproductive and contrary to the policy announced by the new administration in early 2009, which purportedly sought to diplomatically interact with Iran."
In a statement, Mr. Miryousefi said the formation of the group, taken in the context of other hostile American actions including cyberattacks on Iran's nuclear facilities and unilateral sanctions, "convinced Iran that the U.S. does not mean what it says."
Obama administration officials declined to say whether the group's maritime surveillance had assisted the administration's efforts to punish Iran sanctions evaders, which have intensified in recent weeks. "We take information from a lot of different sources," said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject's delicacy. "Sometimes it's useful, sometimes less so, but we're not sorry to have it. I don't look at it necessarily as a nuisance."
Click
here to read the article on the
New York Times' website.
Click
here to learn more about MINERVA, and view examples of illicit Iranian shipping schemes.
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