Russia provided Israel security codes to access Iran’s Tor- M1 air-defense
systems in exchange for an Israeli handover of codes to “hack” drones sold to
Georgia, according to a leaked email from a private American intelligence
company.
An employee for Stratfor wrote the report, dated February 2009,
and cited a “Mexican source,” described as a former police officer and a current
military analyst.
WikiLeaks published the email and announced this week
that it was targeting Stratfor by releasing over 5 million emails stolen from
its servers.
“I inquired more about the compromised Israeli
UAVs. What he explained was that Israel and Russia made a swap – Israel
gave Russia the ‘data link’ code for those specific UAVs; in return, Russia gave
Israel the codes for Iran’s Tor-M1s,” the email said.
The Tor-M1 defense
system is made up of launch vehicles carrying batteries of surface-to- air
missiles. It can detect and track up to 48 targets in the air, and can operate
in an “intensive aerial jamming environment,” according to the Defense Update
website.
Iran purchased 29 systems from Russia in 2005, the website
said.
The Mexican source said he did not think Moscow would sell the
advanced S-300 aerial defense system to Iran, the report continued, adding that
Israel and Turkey had been “collaborating very closely” on studying the
platform.
“He explained how about 8 years ago when Russia sold S- 300s to
Greece to base in Crete (which were supposed to protect Cyprus), Russia
delivered those with a carrier so that Turkey wouldn’t try to sink them. (things
got a bit noisy so i may have misheard some of this), [sic]” the email
said.
“The gist of what he said is that Turkey has been cracking the
S-300 since the Crete sale and has been sharing intel on the S-300 with the
Israelis to ensure that they retain an advantage over Iran should Iran get them
from the Russians,” it added.