He was a well known engineer that had worked in Dubai for 12 years in the transport industry and had an Iranian wife. He was well known as an engineer at the forefront of the rapid development of major projects in the Gulf region.
A regional paper even published his obituary in 2009:
Erik van Sabben, a Dubai-based engineer whose expertise in the heavy lifting and transport industry placed him at the forefront of the rapid development in the Gulf over the past decade, has died. A keen motorcycle rider, he was killed in an accident near Dhaid on Jan 16, just two weeks short of his 37th birthday. Born in Vlissingen, The Netherlands, Mr van Sabben had lived in the Gulf on and off for 12 years. While an undergraduate, he worked as a trainee for Mammoet Gulf in Dubai, a specialist heavy lifting company, which he joined after graduating. He spent the next decade in Dubai, and briefly, Abu Dhabi.
The article is mistaken, I don't know if it was a typo or misunderstanding. He actually died two *years* after this event, and given how insane driving in the UAE is that doesn't seem hard to believe. Two years is a long time to leave a loose end dangling that you intend to disappear after all.
The operation to install the pump was in 2007 but the damage seems to have started in 2009 when Iran started to replace the centrifuges. Stuxnet was publicized in 2010 but Iran might have found out about it before that time.
That's pretty screwed up to kill an asset like that. I doubt Iran could have unraveled the plot so quickly and I'm not sure how they could benefit from killing him.
The idea that someone would use their real identity, or not disappear and get a new identity, while on covert action against America enemies is so absurd it's almost a great skit idea.
"We successfully attacked the nuclear facility!"
"Oh Van, by the way what name did you sign in the log book?"
"...Oh no"
I imagine there are a non-zero amount of readers (but not commenters) who find these stories comments extremely funny.
I think that only goes for when Dutch surnames are adopted by people who don't speak Dutch. "van Sabben" just means "from Sabben" and calling someone "From" just sounds weird. ;)
Sorry, I’ll respond seriously because re-reading my comment sounds like a bit of a cheap shot at P, et al.
From the report in Dutch, they raise the point he may not have even known the magnitude of what he was doing. Until it already had been done and he realized what happened.
He was an asset, not a member of a secret service organization. He was in a useful position in a company, then he was recruited. It sounds like he was more of a useful idiot and not some mastermind.
> it’s unclear if Van Sabben knew exactly what he was doing, but his family said he appeared to have panicked at around the time of the Stuxnet attack.
It was his family who said that he started panicking, so he was probably involved.
After a quick public records search, it looks like he was a real person -- or a real identity with a tangible history. It appears he was formerly married to an American woman in his first marriage.
The comment isn't suggesting that he didn't exist, but rather that after he died in the motorcycle accident, it was possible to say that he was the actor and protect the people who were actually involved.
All this requires is to understand who died shortly after Stuxnet who could have feasibly been involved.
In general, intelligence agencies don’t tend to kill their assets to keep them quiet, because that “benefit” is massively outweighed by the negative effect when trying to recruit the next 1000 assets over the next few years - pragmatism and self-interest, not morality. So its much more likely Iran did it - if a foreign engineer who worked at the attacked site suddenly decides to leave the country, it doesn't take 2 weeks to identify him as a suspect, more like 2 seconds. And if they kill him, it at least sends the message to other potential assets who might work against the interests of Iran. I’m sure Iran would have preferred to capture and question him to try unravel the rest of the network, but they’d settle for killing him I think?
It's much more likely that they just pinned this story on some guy who died in a motorcycling accident.
The point of killing someone over some wrong they did you is publicizing it after the fact. If you don't take credit for it, it doesn't have any deterrent power.
Or alternately, they staged what appeared to be a fatal accident to put him in a witness protection program.
Or alternately, he did it and then tried to back out of the deal. Now arranging an apparently accidental death then became the best way to keep security intact.
The one theory that makes no sense is that they intended his death from the beginning.
All believable scenarios. I personally am fond of the "pin it on a dead guy" story. I want to believe that western security services have some sense of elegance.
The problem with killing an asset is that you've now involved multiple more teams of assets who now know that you kill assets. This is not how you keep secrets, nor how you retain people who keep secrets.
Like the JFK assassination theories that involve killing off an additional dozens of people. You can't cover up one murder by involving an extra 1000 people.
> If you don't take credit for it, it doesn't have any deterrent power.
The various deaths associated with Putin are a counter example here. Russia denies involvement but the method usually makes it pretty obvious. Rare poison, unlikely situation etc.
The putin assassinations are a little different though. The assassinated are publicly known to have links to the regime. The methods of death have a similar signature and the rarity of that type of death makes most people draw one likely conclusion so that the message is communicated. People fall out of windows for minor infractions and to really send a message they are poisoned.
The asset in this case wasn't known publicly and the method of death makes people assume it was simply an accident. Unless they did some private announcement, no one was deterred. If it was Iran and they wanted to send a message, they would probably have to out the asset publicly and/or make it clear that it was an assassination. e.g. a bomb would send a clear signal that it was more likely to be a nation state assassination and not some accident or a random robbery/act of violence.
The entire point of stuxnet was to covertly sabotage the centrifuges, so it wasn't clear that they were broken until months or years later. 2 weeks isn't remotely long enough for Iran to know they were sabotaged.
Talking about it would have painted a huge target on his back for retribution from the Iranian government. It would have also put a target on his wife's back, as well as all of her family that is presumably still in Iran. Killing him also would make it much harder to recruit assets in the future, if it became common knowledge that you will be offed after your mission is complete.
It seems much more likely that he actually did die in a random motorcycle accident (not uncommon), or he was entirely uninvolved and a dead man was chosen to pin blame on in order to hide the real method(or, to make Iranians stop trusting foreign contractors, making them do everything in-house with higher costs and worse quality).
It doesn't even have to be a totally "random" (unrelated) motorcycle accident.
If he panicked after the Stuxnet attack, as his family is reported to have said, then it's likely he has behaving erratically and was fearful for his life.
That could easily translate to circumstances where he rides a motorcycle in a particularly dangerous manner - e.g. fleeing from someone he thought was Iranian/Dutch/US/Israeli intelligence (even if they weren't).
Is a car accident and not publicly announcing it as a reprisal sending a message? Seems a little too quiet for that and like it might be cleaning up loose ends by someone else instead.
I’m not clear on the timeline. As I understand it, the hack went on for ages before it went malignant and started damaging stuff. Is it 2 weeks from being deployed, or 2 weeks from wrecking equipment?
The guy probably existed. It is his involvement which may have been fabricated to hide the real story. His death, the time and the manner, exactly provides indirect credibility to such fabrication.
Any proof he died? It's not hard for western countries to manufacture identities. Pretty common practice to given sources a form of witness protection.
I agree to the first point that it isn't suspicious given how dangerous motorcycle accidents are. These accidents have a staggering 80% injury or death rate.
> These accidents have a staggering 80% injury or death rate
This is not the number that really matters in this context.
Falling out of a 8 story window has an incredibly high injury/death rate. Yet those we often assume ARE the result of foul-play.
What we're really comparing here is the probability of a party either lying, or contributing (causing) the motor cycle accident. The lethality rates aren't super interesting in this case. The main difference between this and falling out of windows, is that window-falls are much more rare then motor cycle accidents.
> Falling out of a 8 story window has an incredibly high injury/death rate. Yet those we often assume ARE the result of foul-play.
Who is 'we'? Falls out of buildings are overwhelmingly due to accidents by tradespeople or suicide.
Most homicides by being pushed from a height occur in remote areas, not from buildings. Most windows on high buildings are limited in how far they open during normal operation for safety reasons. And most older buildings that lack these features have smaller windows with higher sills. Statistics aren't tracked to this level by most crime reports because it is so overwhelmingly rare for someone to be killed this way.
While homicidal defenestration makes for a good fictional story line, I don't think it is useful for murderers.
Plenty of weirdly coincidental falls from windows:
> Ravil Maganov, September 1 2022, reportedly hospitalised for heart problems and depression, then "fell out of a window"
> Grigory Kochenov, December 7 2022, reportedly fell to his death from his balcony while officials from the Investigative Committee executed a search warrant for his apartment
> Dmitriy Zelenov, December 9 2022, reportedly felt ill and fell over a railing and hit his head, later died in hospital without regaining consciousness
> Pavel Antov, December 24 2022, fell out of window from Hotel Sai International
> Marina Yankina, February 16 2023, found dead after falling from a window on the 16th-floor of a high-rise building.
> Artyom Bartenev, June 8 2023, found dead after falling 12 stories from his apartment window.
> Kristina Baikova, June 23 2023, fell off her apartment at the 11th floor; circumstances of the incident have not yet been clarified.
And that entire list fits inside of the rounding error of the number of people who die due to suicide and accident each year. 1.7 million Americans have attempted suicide.
This list is not complete and we are talking about deaths, not attempted suicides and we are talking about deaths in closed circle, not in overall population, so it is a "statistical oddity".
I should have specified - important/at-risk people who suddenly fall from a window, especially after they did something the country they were in doesn't like.
> Statistics aren't tracked to this level by most crime reports because it is so overwhelmingly rare for someone to be killed this way.
The real issue here is we aren't comparing the statistics of the "average joe".
For random-person we can predict the reason for their fall was unlikely to be state-level foul play - in fact near zero chance of it.
The likely hood of state-level foul play is substantially higher for spies, rich oligarchs with unpopular opinions, journalists, etc. How much higher I have no idea.
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Anyway my point was the lethality of the cause of death is really not what anyone is interested in. When spies, rich oligarchs with unpopular opinions, journalists, etc die shortly after they did something particularly provoking I don't think people care about the lethality of the incident as much as the cause.
Yes, when people work in sensitive positions with the potential to make enemies, they have a higher risk of death from those causes.
However, it's also easy to fall into the fallacious trap of defining people solely by their profession. People who have sensitive jobs and also do other risky activities in their spare time incur those risks in addition to the risks they have due to their profession.
In fact, some successful people with enemies engage in more risky activities because they can afford to do so. Rich people dying in general aviation accidents is a pretty frequent pattern, for example.
The odds of dying in a traffic accident in that country are considerably higher than in the United States, and much higher than in other developed countries (sorry USA, you suck at road safety, but not as much as the UAE does)[1].
While I don't have country-specific statistics to hand, the odds of dying riding a motorcycle are much, much higher than in a car. One estimate is that you are around 27 times more likely to die per distance driven/ridden [2].
Even so, in an absolute sense, the odds of dying on a typical motorcycle commute are low. My guess is that your odds of meeting foul play shortly after screwing with the Iranian nuclear program are likely higher than dying in a random traffic accident. But coincidences do occur.
Citation 1 does not support the claim that the USA "sucks at road safety" -- only a handful of the countries listed actually have a statistic for deaths per km traveled, which is the metric that matters (since the USA is much less dense than many of the countries it's being compared to, its citizens drive farther).
The US is right in the middle -- doing better than the Czech Republic and South Korea -- on the metric that matters on the page you linked, but really, more data is needed because the metric you want to look at is mostly missing from the table.
If we compare US to Germany that has 1000s of km without any speed restrictions then it has roughly 2 times less deaths. Even France, where people drive like they have a death wish has 1/3 less deaths. It is even slightly higher than Belgium that is the only Western European country where I have experienced potholes on highway. Perhaps US is not strictly sucking at it but it is as such clearly on the high side.
They are especially dangerous in autocratic countries, when also co-operating with powerful intelligence agencies, trying to plant spyware in an arch-enemy's nuclear infrastructure. I hear even helmets and spine protectors have a hard time with that situation :-)
But to be serious, I meant it mostly that it's certainly one case that would warrant extra investigations. Even if it was a random accident, someone like the Iranians could have claimed that their super advanced spy hunting team got him.
It doesn't matter how dangerous. He had years before and after to die this way. The fact that it happened right after has very low probability to be by chance. Which means it very likely wasn't.
You're applying Occam's razor for the most involved and complicated cyber attack in history, that was organized by some of the most powerful intelligence agencies in the world? Talk about stretching an already over stretched "rule of thumb"
So I am going to float another conspiracy just for fun sakes…
USA and Israel think Iran have got a bit close to figuring out Stuxnet culprit, they put out a story and use a poor guy who can’t defend himself against the accusation of being involved, one who happened to have had a tragic accident with a motorbike and who so just happened to do some work in Iran. And boom, the death is suspicious so there must be truth to it all…
That is probably more believable (to me at least).
Are we sure that he actually died in that accident and not chilling somewhere in Florida under a different name? Cause it can be a good cover story do disappear your agent that successfully fulfilled his mission.
Well, that’s not suspicious at all. Any of the parties involved could conceivably benefit from his accident.