Iranian diplomats burn documents before leaving Albanian embassy

Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama's order that all Iranian diplomatic officials and administrative technicians must leave the Balkan country within 24 hours appeared to be the starting signal for Persian preparations. No compromising documents were to remain in the Iranian embassy in Tirana.

Or at least that is what is clear from information leaked by the Reuters news agency. According to an eyewitness statement to the agency, "a man was throwing papers into a rusty barrel as flames lit up the three floors of the Iranian embassy" in the early hours of Thursday morning. A few hours after Rama's statement. A few hours before the Persian officials left the country.

Already in the morning, the area around the embassy - located less than 200 metres from the chief executive's office - appeared calm, and despite a large police presence surrounding the premises, the only notable movements were limited, according to local media reports, to the entry and exit of several cars with diplomatic plates and darkened windows, transporting the last members of the diplomatic corps.

On Wednesday, 7 September, Edi Rama, in a video statement, announced the official and total severance of diplomatic ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran as a result of a cyber-attack that both US investigators - one of Albania's main allies, who provided FBI experts - and Albanian and NATO computer scientists and specialists concluded was backed by the government in Tehran. The attack took place on 15 July and required almost a month of work to recover the lost data.

"The cyber attack threatened to paralyse public services, erase digital systems and hack into state records, steal electronic communications from the government intranet and cause chaos and insecurity in the country," Rama said, pointing to "irrefutable evidence" that Tehran not only "orchestrated" but also "financed" the cyber attack on the Albanian government's official websites.

The Ayatollahs' regime, however, has denied any connection with the attack that Washington and Tirana accuse it of collaborating with, and has dismissed the Albanian Prime Minister's decision as "ill-considered and short-sighted".

"The role played by third parties in making [the baseless] accusations against the Islamic Republic shows the influence of these countries in supporting terrorism and sedition," the Iranian Foreign Ministry said in a statement, implicitly referring to the US role in the investigations and Israel's influence.

A "planned move" is what, according to Tehran, the Tirana denunciation and the consequent severing of diplomatic relations represents. A "planned move" that, a few hours later, was endorsed by the United States - which had also been involved in the work of investigating and repairing the damage of the cyber-attack - and subsequently applauded by the Israeli media. A "planned move" that comes in what seemed, albeit increasingly less so, the final stretch of negotiations to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.

The "final text" proposed in August by Josep Borrell, the European Union's High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, to revive the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) - which in 2015 served to limit Iranian uranium enrichment and curb Western sanctions against the Ayatollahs' government - has in recent weeks become a ball that has repeatedly jumped from the US to the Iranian court.

Investigations by an International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team on Persian soil - due to the presence of uranium traces in undeclared locations -, the removal of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the US list of foreign terrorist groups, and the reduction of economic sanctions, have led governments on both sides of the world to negotiate "red lines" that, although they initially seemed surmountable, are becoming increasingly insurmountable by the day.

"Not constructive" was the US definition of the draft it received from the Iranian counterpart. "Less optimistic than 48 hours ago about convergence in the negotiation process", Borrell said of his own expectations, even though he had been the promoter of the "final text" that in August relaunched talks that were already considered frozen after several months of stagnation.

All this, together with Israeli pressure to halt the agreement, as well as recent reports - drafted by Swedish and German intelligence - denouncing Iranian espionage in industrial and nuclear matters, and now the accusations of cyber-attacks by countries such as Montenegro and Albania, further complicate the arrival of a new pact.

The issue of the Iranian dissident group, initially exiled in Iraq and later displaced to Albania, the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK) or People's Mujahedin Organization of Iran, has also played an important role in increasing tensions between Tehran and Tirana. This was evidenced by the Persian government's references to the presence of a heavily guarded community of some 3,000 MEK members just 40 kilometres from the Albanian capital. 

In this sense, the July cyber-attack seems to be closely linked to the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq group, which had not only planned to hold the Free Iran World Summit on 23 and 24 July - attended by important political and diplomatic representatives of several Western powers - but also, days after the cyber-attack, several Tirana media outlets reported the publication of personal data (such as personal numbers, names and photographs) of MEK members contained in Albanian government records. 

Albania might not have been attacked "if it had not protected the MEK", was one of the conclusions of the Albanian parliamentarian of the Democratic Party of Albania, Aldo Bumci.