Parts made by more than a dozen American and Western companies were found inside a single Iranian drone that was shot down in Ukraine last fall, according to an estimate of the Ukrainian secret services that exclusively acquired by CNN.
The assessment, which was shared with US government officials late last year, shows the extent of the problem facing the Biden administration, which has pledged to halt production drones from Iran that Russia is launching by the hundreds into Ukraine.
CNN reported last month that the White House had created a team work to explore how American and Western technology (by smaller equipment such as semiconductors and GPS units to larger components such as engines) ended up in Iranian drones.
Of the 52 components the Ukrainians removed from Iran's Shahed-136 drone, 40 appear to have been made by 13 different US companies, according to the assessment.
The remaining 12 components were manufactured by companies in Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan and China, according to the declassified report.
But the options to combat the issue seem to be very limited. The US has for years imposed tough export control restrictions and sanctions to prevent the "leakage" of high-quality materials to Iran. Now US officials are considering increased enforcement of those sanctions, encouraging companies to better monitor the supply chains they use. This seems to be important if one wants to track down the third party distributors who buy these products and promote them in embargoed countries.
