WikiLeaks: Israel has codes for Iranian anti-aircraft system

Israel may already have the codes to crack into Iran’s anti-aircraft missile defense systems, according to WikiLeaks, which on Tuesday continued to publish email conversations by employees from the Texas-based Stratfor global intelligence firm.

The Stratfor email conversation took place in 2009 and focused on an alleged deal between Israel and Russia, in which Israel would supply codes to hack into the unmanned aerial vehicles that Israel had sold to Russia’s neighbor, Georgia, in exchange for the codes for Russia’s state-of-the-art TOR-M1 anti-aircraft system stationed in Iran. If the codes are indeed in Israeli hands, they could prove helpful in a possible attack on Iran’s nuclear installations.

According to the WikiLeaks document, in 2009 a Stratfor analyst claimed to have been told by a Mexican source of the Israel-Russian deal. It was speculated in the email conversation that after Russia invaded Georgia over a land dispute in 2008, Georgia found that its Israeli-made UAV’s were not performing as successfully as they should, possibly because their communication codes were hacked, leading the country to seek to purchase UAV spy planes from other countries.

In related news, according to Israel Radio, Georgian Defense Minister Bachana Akhalaia was in Israel on Tuesday. Akhalaia’s visit was unannounced and it was not clear with whom he met or for what purpose.

According to military experts, the TOR-M1 surface-to-air missile system is a mobile, integrated air defense system. It is designed to detect aircraft, including guided missiles, at medium, low and very low altitudes. The system is reportedly able to operate in an intensive aerial jamming environment and can detect and track up to 48 separate targets at once, and can attack two targets simultaneously.

On Monday WikiLeaks published a different email conversation in which a Stratfor employee cited a “confirmed Israeli intelligence agent” as saying that “the Israelis already destroyed all the Iranian nuclear infrastructure on the ground weeks ago.”

When other Stratfor employees asked their colleague to clarify, he responded, according to the email, that “Israeli commandos in collaboration with Kurd forces destroyed [a] few underground facilities mainly used for the Iranian defense and nuclear research projects.”

Some of the Stratfor employees involved in the email chain cast doubt on the credibility of the information provided by the alleged Israeli intelligence source, but did not completely discount it.

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