> 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).
These stories are all "according to intelligence sources", they can really anonymously brief out anything that serves their needs.