Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times
United Against Nuclear Iran, a private advocacy group, keeps a long-distance technological eye on compliance with sanctions from Midtown Manhattan.
Inside a nondescript Midtown Manhattan office, a couple of computer analysts spend their days peering intently at large screens of satellite mapping surveillance data, watching dozens of little blips moving like snails. Each one, they said, represents a ship controlled by Iran or its trading partners.
They said they are looking for suspicious behavior.
The analysts work for United Against Nuclear Iran, a privately financed advocacy group founded by former American diplomats that has become an annoying thorn to Iran, which regards it as a vigilante extension of a hostile American foreign policy. The group’s latest effort is its maritime monitoring system, which it says provides a new level of scrutiny of compliance with the sanctions imposed on Iran by the West because of Iran’s disputed nuclear energy program.
Although the economic and trade sanctions, including a European oil embargo, have deeply hurt Iran, the country has been somewhat successful in finding ways to evade them, the group says. A litany of clever tactics for cloaking commerce on the high seas has included reflagging, renaming or clandestinely acquiring ships, engaging in secretive ship-to-ship transfers to mask the origins of oil or other contraband, temporarily disabling onboard satellite transponders to hide their true locations or simply transmitting false destinations.
“Iran thrives on deception and disguise,” said Mark D. Wallace, the chief executive of United Against Nuclear Iran, who would like to see a maritime blockade of the country.
Mr. Wallace said the Iran presidential election on Friday, in which a cleric and former nuclear negotiator, Hassan Rowhani, was elected on a campaign promoting better relations with the outside world, had done nothing to alter his group’s view. “The regime has shown that it plans more of the same,” he said in a statement on the group’s Web site. “The world’s response should therefore remain the same — the continued isolation of Iran, and comprehensive sanctions.”
Short of a blockade, he said in an interview, the maritime monitoring system, which has been in operation for about five months, has at least given Iran a new reason to worry.
“It’s a technology-based advocacy tool,” he said. “This technology and our monitoring allows us to expose sanctions-avoidance schemes.”
Martin House, the monitoring system’s director and lead analyst, said it used publicly available satellite transmissions from ship transponders, including data on speed, identity, direction and destination, and correlated the information with other navigational data and computer algorithms. He said the system created vessel behavior profiles that could identify questionable activities even if the transponders were temporarily turned off.
Several times, Mr. Wallace and his aides said, the system had exposed possible sanctions violations that the group had then publicized, forcing the Iranians or their partners to change plans.
In April, for example, an Iranian tanker named Daisy, flying under a Tanzanian flag, had to abandon a planned voyage to Malta, which has pledged compliance with the sanctions. Warned by Mr. Wallace’s group that Daisy was a blacklisted vessel, the Maltese government informed the ship that it was not welcome, he said.
In another recent episode, the monitoring system showed that three vessels operated by Medallion Reederei GmbH, a German shipping company, had visited Iranian ports operated by Tidewater Middle East Company, a sanctioned Iranian port management company. After Mr. Wallace wrote to the German shipper expressing concern, its managing director, Falk Holtmann, responded in a letter assuring him he was looking into the port calls and would “not tolerate any breach of international sanctions.”
Other instances of what the group considered suspicious behavior discovered by its monitoring system have included mysterious linkups in the Red Sea between the Iranian bulk-carrier vessel Parisan and other vessels from Iran, Egypt and Turkey; and a curious anchoring of three old tankers near Singapore, nominally owned by a Greek shipper, that Iran may be using to store and transfer embargoed oil. The Greek shipper, Dimitris Cambis, was recently blacklisted by the Treasury Department for helping Iran evade sanctions.
“We’re not the only people in the world with this information,” said Nathan Carleton, a spokesman for United Against Nuclear Iran. “The Treasury and State Departments are following this, too. But there wasn’t anyone analyzing this in total. We really feel like watch people.”
Some maritime experts said the group’s monitoring system could also misidentify innocent activity as suspicious behavior. The transponders that commercial ships are required to use to signal their location, for example, can sometimes appear to be switched off in areas where reception is poor, which is sometimes the case in the Red Sea. A crew can forget to update a ship’s transmission data on destinations or cargo when plans change, but that does not necessarily signal a deliberate deception.
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