International pressure on Tehran is having impact

The containers on the ship Francop, which the Israel Navy raided yesterday, were marked with the acronym IRISL. That stands for Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines.

IRISL is a state-controlled company with a fleet of 95 commercial ships, including 18 container ships. It plies routes to the Far East, the Gulf, Egypt and Europe. And it is one of the companies the UN Security Council listed in its sanctions resolutions against Iran, due to its role in transporting equipment for Tehran's nuclear and missile programs.

The company's directors are fully aware of this problem, as are the commanders of the Quds Force - the branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that is responsible for shipping arms to Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah. They all know that ships with Iranian flags, or that have been leased by IRISL, are likely to draw the attention of western intelligence services and their navies.

Therefore, in an effort to divert attention, they loaded hundreds of containers onto a single Iranian ship that sailed to the Egyptian port of Dumyat. The cargo manifest described the shipment as a civilian cargo of polyethylene, a common plastic. At the Egyptian port, the containers were loaded onto Francop, a German ship that flies the flag of Antigua. Its destination was Latakia, a port in Syria, from which the arms would be smuggled overland to Lebanon.

This is not the first time Iran has used these methods. Approximately a month ago, a German-flagged ship leased to the Islamic Republic of Iran was stopped in the Red Sea. And in January, a Russian-owned ship was seized in Cyprus because it was carrying a load of arms to Syria, probably for Hezbollah. The seizure followed surveillance by the United States Navy that began in the Persian Gulf.

The fact that Iran is trying to ship arms under the guise of civilian cargo suggests that the pressure exerted by the international community is having an impact. Moreover, its assumption that using an intermediary port, like the one in Egypt, would make it easier to evade the embargo proved false. Egypt, too, is party to the international efforts to curtail arms shipments from Iran to its allies in the Middle East.

Iran did not invent this method; North Korea has been using it for years. But even "normative" countries have used it when they want to conceal certain actions.

During the operation to arrest nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, for instance, he was allegedly transferred to an Israeli commercial vessel for the trip back to Israel after he was kidnapped from Italy. The method usually involves leasing ships that fly the flags of other countries, or simply hiring the services of other companies. Alternatively, front companies with false owners can be set up, but these can be used only once. The cargo manifest, on which the contents of the ship are listed, can be forged to show that the materials in question are for civilian use.

Destination ports can also be forged on a ship's documents. And often, ships change their names on the high seas, as happened recently with the Arctic Sea, a Russian ship that had allegedly disappeared - until Russian special forces seized control of it. At one point, the ship changed its name to that of a vessel registered in North Korea.There are also examples of cargoes being transferred from one ship to another at sea, after which the original ship was sunk.