Wikileaks: Italian firm sold Syria secure radios as crackdown raged

As the US and Europe leveled increasingly severe sanctions on Syria, Western tech companies were still working eagerly with the Assad regime and Syrian government-owned entities. This is according to e-mails obtained by Wikileaks, dating from 2006 up until March of 2012. The e-mails are now being published in waves by Wikileaks, both through its own website and through a collection of news organizations.

The first wave of released documents—25 out of more than two million e-mails obtained by Wikileaks—focuses on Italian networking and systems integration vendor SELEX (a subsidiary of Finmeccanica—which, coincidentally, also owns Agusta, the helicopter manufacturer tied to the development of the Chinese Z-10 attack helicopter) and Greek network integrator Intracom. E-mails between representatives of the two companies published by Wikileaks show how they worked around the ever-tightening political noose of trade sanctions to bring a joint project in Syria to completion. That project? A secure software-defined radio network for the Syrian government based on SELEX’s TETRA trunked radio network hardware.