linking the diplomat to a possible Iranian plot to launch cyber attacks on the United States.
The Venezuelan embassy in Washington was notified Friday that Livia Acosta Noguera, the consul general in Miami, had been declared persona non grata and had until Tuesday to leave the country, State Department spokesman William Ostick said.
“We cannot comment on specific details behind the decision to declare Ms Acosta persona non grata at this time,” he said.
The State Department had said last month it was looking into “very disturbing” allegations that Acosta was a participant in a possible Iranian plot to launch cyber attacks on sensitive US national security facilities.
The allegations were made in a documentary that aired on the US Spanish-language television network Univision, which said Acosta was taped discussing the alleged plot with a Mexican computer expert.
The contacts reportedly took place in 2007 while Acosta was serving as a second secretary at the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico City.
An excerpt from one conversation showed Acosta demanding information that the student, Juan Carlos Munoz Ledo, had passed on to Iranian diplomats about the locations of US nuclear power plants. She was quoted as later telling Munoz that she had passed the information to the head of Chavez’s presidential security unit.
Univision reported that Munoz said he was recruited for the Iranian plot by a leftist professor at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, but then recruited other students to secretly videotape the Iranian and Venezuelan diplomats he met with.
According to Univision, the students then sent the material they gathered to US embassy officials in Mexico, the FBI, Pentagon and US lawmakers. Several of the students were reportedly seeking asylum in the United States.
On December 12, a State Department spokesman said the department could not corroborate the Univision report, but said, “We’re looking into it and continue to assess what additional actions we might take.”
One of the Iranian diplomats told Univision he was presented with a hacking plot by the Mexican group. But he said he turned it down, in part because he thought they were CIA agents.
The students claimed that the idea had originated with the Cuban government. The report did not provide any evidence that sthe Iranian officials they met took them seriously or ever accepted their offer.
One group of Venezuelans in Miami said Sunday that they supported the US government’s move.
“The consul of Venezuela in Miami had not only conspired with Iranian officials to attack the security of the United States, but also had converted the Venezuelan Consulate in Miami into a spy center to monitor the activities of Venezuelan activists, especially in South Florida, with the intention of neutralizing us,” said a statement from the group, which included several organizations of Venezuelan exiles.
It was not entirely clear if the alleged cyber plot originated with the Iranian embassy in Mexico, which then recruited the Mexican professor, or if it originated with the Mexican professor, who then tried to interest the Iranian embassy.
