Huib Modderkolk

Huib Modderkolk (Investigative journalist)
Born	1982 Netherlands
Nationality	Dutch
Exposed	• Erik van Sabben • AIVD • MIVD
Journalist that has done multiple probes into Dutch intelligence services.  Writer In office 2007 - Present Employer NRC Handelsblad,  De Volkskrant

Huib Modderkolk is a Dutch journalist. He has worked at newspaper De Volkskrant since 2015; before that he worked at NRC Handelsblad for seven years. Modderkolk is specialized in intelligence agencies, mass surveillance and the internet.

AIVD

Trailer for Modderkolk's documentary in his search for the a suspected Dutch agent that installed Stuxnet possibly starting somewhere around 2005, later to be discovered to be Erik van Sabben. (With English Subtitles)

Stuxnet

Full article: Erik van Sabben

Full article: Stuxnet

In July 2019 the AIVD tried to prohibit Modderkolk from releasing a book that was planning to reveal the name of the operation and a foreign spook that cooperated in the Cozy Bear case. The case was noted by lawyers to be very strange as the AIVD seemingly tried to censor parts that were requested with public sources, before he finished the book. The AIVD won the case even though Modderkolk had already removed details after he e-mailed them a concept version. Modderkolk started investigating after he produced an article regarding the sources of wikileaks and his office was inexplicably hit with power outrages which he and his colleague suspected was done deliberate. Modderkolk worked 6 years on this book - called It's war, but nobody sees it - and among other things revealed the CIA often utilized the AIVD for quite intensive tasks (including aggressive cyber warfare such as involvement in the spreading of the Stuxnet-virus in Iran) that the AIVD got nothing back for return.

Book Revelations

Among other things, the book is full of interesting questionable decisions by the AIVD, including the hunt and placement in a mental facility of infamous underage hacker Edwin Robbe, who was placed in a mental facility for being labelled mentally ill and part of "anonymous" for using known unpatched vulnerabilities to gain access to the computer servers of Dutch telecommunications company KPN without stealing any data. Robbe fled the country and died later in a Seoul hotel of alleged suicide.

Another examples takes place at the hack at Belgacom's international unit BICS, when British GCHQ set up the hack via fake LinkedIn pages of three BICS system administrators; resulting in obstruction from international police and politicians to investigate: Europol refused, part of the operation to cover up the British hack mostly politically according to Modderkolk. Dutch parliament subsequently refused to follow a motion passed in the Dutch lower house to allow intelligence gathered by the AIVD and MIVD to benefit the CIA and US Air Force in killing alleged terrorists with drones without any due process. When a Somali man found his way to court for what Modderkolk found out was, in international law, a “summary execution" of his two children, while losing a leg himself, then Defence Minister Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert denied the man to have even existed.

Other examples included giving the CIA classified information for drone attacks killing more children, GCHQ hacking European institutions with the protection of Europol or the fact that Russian cyber security company Kaspersky was targeted multiple times for alleged cooperation with the FSB, giving Rian van Rijbroek's "ludicrous" allegations some very strange coincidences.

Modderkolk is de facto the only book about the AIVD that was allowed in Nieuwsuur raising questions why the book was so publicized in the first place, perhaps as a form of a limited hangout. Modderkolk first book was sold over 100000 times and translated in English, German, Greek with The Guardian even publicizing a part of the book about how the Dutch police arrested multiple teenage hackers.

Covid 19

Modderkolk was very critical of the increasing privacy limiting measures during the Covid 19 pandemic. He argued that the passports "would never really totally disappear".

 

A Quote by Huib Modderkolk

Page	Quote	Date	Source
Erik van Sabben	“To his family members, it is still a mystery: Dutchman Erik van Sabben leaves for ten days in late 2008 for the Iranian capital of Tehran. The 36-year-old engineer - a fearless adventurer who is not afraid to take risks and works in Dubai for a heavy transport company - is going with his Iranian wife to visit her family. It should be a festive end to the year. But after just one day, Van Sabben, used to working in stressful situations and under high pressure, wants to leave Iran. He seems panicked. Why the engineer wants to leave the country, he cannot say. His Dutch mother says of it fifteen years later, “We all thought it was very strange. His Iranian wife: “He was so upset and insisted that we leave immediately.<a href="#cite_note-8">[8]</a><a href="#cite_note-9">[9]</a> What his immediate family and wife do not know: Van Sabben carries a secret with him. He leads a double life. Research by the Volkskrant, in which over a period of two years 43 people were spoken to, 19 of whom were from the intelligence services AIVD and MIVD, shows that Van Sabben was recruited by the Dutch secret service.”	2017	De Volksrant

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