Longing for James Bond

I do not know if Israel is responsible for that curious virus dubbed Duqu that was planted at three of the hotels that hosted the delegations to the Iranian nuclear talks, as the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.

But, if Israel really did plant this spy program, then U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was wrong when, after the interim deal was signed, he said that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not know what it contained. Israel knows just as much as the world powers. And that's all the speculation for now.

Thereis no doubt that the timing of the American newspaper report only increases the pressure and the suspicion amongst the delegations and the countries involved in the emerging deal. Israel and the Gulf states are closely following every bit of information that comes out of the talks. The question is how.

There are many ways to obtain information, and no one is naive enough to think that in the nuclear talks, which began in 2003 and were renewed in 2009, each side did not make every effort to get information about the other.

Even among the world powers, which are supposed to be working together, there is still a certain desire to know what the Chinese or the Russians or the French, and definitely the Americans, are going to do.

Everyone, of course, wants to know what the Iranians are doing, and the Israelis have already taught the world a thing or two about obtaining information.

As the nuclear talks continue, there is also an ongoing war of nerves between the different countries involved in the Iranian nuclear issue. In March, the same Wall Street Journal reported that Israel was spying on the United States. Alarm bells sounded and Israel hurried to deny the report. There was also a report that Washington intended to exclude Israel from information about the nuclear talks after confidential information had leaked from Jerusalem. This report also fizzled out.

And by the way, if Israel really is behind the Duqu virus, it still would not need American information.

There's no doubt that the age in which we live allows the spy world new options: no more secret agents, no more risking spies, no more James Bond stories; instead, viruses with ears that can do the job until Kaspersky agents in Russia find them and reveal them to the world.

I don't know what's true and what's not in this story, but it all makes sense. And what makes the story very believable is the name Kaspersky, which reminds us of the days when everyone spied on everyone else, and the virus was not an attack on a computer, but an American agent who had crossed over into the Russian frost. Those were the days.

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