Swedish intelligence accuses Iran of trying to steal nuclear technology

While all international attention is focused on the negotiating tug-of-war between Washington and Tehran - to reactivate the 2015 nuclear pact - Swedish intelligence, through a report, has denounced the Persian Islamic Republic's attempts to get its hands on the Scandinavian country's nuclear weapons technology. The 80-page document, entitled 'Swedish Annual Security Report' for 2021, revealed that "Iran also conducts industrial espionage operations, such as those aimed primarily at the Swedish high-tech industry and Swedish products, which can be used in nuclear weapons programmes". 

This was made public on Monday by the US news network Fox News, which also consulted a spokesman for the Swedish Security Service (SÄPO, Swedish acronym for "security police").  At present, "Iran is one of the three countries that pose the greatest threat to the security of Sweden and Swedish interests. The other two are Russia and China," it said.

"Iranian intelligence officers operate, among other ways, under diplomatic cover in Sweden," the report warned of one of the strategies that the Ayatollahs' regime is allegedly employing to get its hands on nuclear information. But this is not a new issue for the Scandinavian government. 

At the end of August, Stockholm set its legal teams in motion to convict two Swedish-Iranian brothers, arrested in 2021 on charges of spying for the Islamic Republic's intelligence, according to the Swedish daily Expressen. Peyman Kia and Payam Kia, aged 42 and 35 respectively, are the names of the arrested brothers, who were reportedly born in Iran and moved to Sweden in 1994 when they were still children. Thus, the decade between March 2011 and the end of 2021 (when they were arrested) would be the period during which the Kia brothers reportedly carried out their espionage activities. 

In addition, according to various rumours, Peyman Kia may have worked as a member of SÄPO, in Swedish military intelligence and in the Swedish Special Procurement Office (KSI), as well as his younger brother, who was also briefly employed by SÄPO. 

However, Stockholm's warnings about Persian efforts to obtain nuclear technology and information come as no surprise to international observers, as Germany, in a report released by its intelligence services in July, reported "a significant increase in indications of Iranian procurement attempts related to nuclear proliferation in the interest of its nuclear programme". Proliferation' is understood to mean the "acquisition of expertise and goods for the development and production of weapons of mass destruction". 

Although the document - which in 368 pages cited the Islamic Republic of Iran 59 times - did not detail the nature of Tehran's nuclear activity, it did state that "in the event of a suspicion of possible violations of the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action], the BfV [Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution] would forward the information to the responsible authorities". 

This is in line with the position of the Swedish intelligence spokesman, who refrained from defining the nature of Iran's nuclear efforts. "We cannot go into further details beyond what is mentioned in the report," he said. Although Tehran has always maintained that its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, Western governments believe that the levels of uranium enrichment achieved at Iranian facilities are increasingly close to those needed to make nuclear weapons. 

In any case, Fox News has argued that the emergence of all these reports merely confirms the Ayatollah government's continued work on its nuclear programme. This could also raise questions about the efficiency of the new nuclear deal, which, according to estimates, could save Iran up to $275 billion in sanctions in the first year alone.

The information gathered by the Swedish Annual Security Report comes amid tensions between Sweden and Iran - over the life sentence of former Iranian official Hamid Nouri, tried for war crimes committed in the summer of 1988 - and just as the G5+1 group of countries (Germany, China, France, the United Kingdom and Russia + the United States, which unilaterally abandoned the JCPOA in 2018) is in what could be the final stretch of negotiations to revive the nuclear pact.