Spying On The Iran Negotiations — Even At The Montreux Palace

Here.

The negotiations in Switzerland between Iran and the 5-plus-1 took place at several luxury hotels on Lac Leman. Two were in Geneva. But one of them was the Montreux Palace, Vladimir and Vera Nabokov’s last home. Was a bug placed under the bronze slightly absurd statue of Nabokov that is now in the lobby? Or possibly a listening device hidden in the right front leg of the writer’s lutrin, if it has been moved back to the hotel where it had been for so long, back from Dmitri’s apartment, perched high on a slippery slope above the hotel, so that it could be put on display to those who come — venite adoremus — to worship the sacred relics? Not at all. The spying was achieved  through software that could burrow into the software of others,  and feed information back to those who were seeking it. Unromantic, but effective. Less a case of a dashing Reilly Ace of Spies in Petrograd, or Richard Sorge in Tokyo,  more a case of a small team of nameless computer whizzes, each a smoot tall, and all of them wishing to remain forever anonymous, for their fantastic exploits conducted, let’s pretend, from  a nondescript apartment on Rehov Nili.