Comment: And why is this interesting? Because the US, immediately after the Ukraine Airlines plane was shot down near Tehran last week, said a missile or two fired from an Iranian TOR-1M air defense system (bought from Russia) was the culprit...
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.
Read the rest here
Comment: Ynet further reported at the time that the Wikileaks document in question states that Russia made this trade in advance of the Russia-Georgia war in 2008.
A caveat here is of course that the above leak is third-hand information from 'a guy in Mexico who knew a guy...'
Nonetheless, we could well imagine such a 'trade' occurring. We could also imagine that Iran might have long since patched the above problem (given that it was publicly leaked in 2012, 8 years ago), but something along these lines (cyberwarfare, hacking, etc.) may have played a key role in the downing of the Ukraine Airlines flight near Tehran last week.