Parts manufactured by at least 13 different companies from the United States of America were found in one of the Iranian-made Shahed-136 unmanned aerial vehicles shot down in the fall of 2022 in Ukraine, European Pravda reports citing CNN.
This data, as the TV channel notes, is another proof that despite sanctions, Iran is still finding an abundance of commercially available technology. Of the 52 components Ukrainians removed from the Iranian Shahed-136 drone, 40 appear to have been manufactured by 13 different American companies, the rest - by companies in Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan and China.
According to the Ukrainian assessment, among the US-made components found in the drone were nearly two dozen parts built by Texas Instruments, including microcontrollers, voltage regulators, and digital signal controllers; a GPS module by Hemisphere GNSS; a microprocessor by NXP USA Inc.; and circuit board components by Analog Devices and Onsemi.
Also discovered were components built by International Rectifier – now owned by the German company Infineon – and the Swiss company U-Blox.
All the companies emphasized that they condemn any unauthorized use of their products while noting that combating the diversion and misuse of their semiconductors and other microelectronics is an industry-wide challenge that they are working to confront.
Sanctioned Iranian companies appear to be successfully working around efforts to cut off their supply of crucial components and electronics. For example, the company that built the downed drone, Iran Aircraft Manufacturing Industries Corporation, has been under US sanctions since 2008.
Ukraine handed over information about American components in Iranian drones to the United States as early as the end of 2022.
The US has for years imposed tough export control restrictions and sanctions to prevent Iran from obtaining high-end materials. Now US officials are looking at enhanced enforcement of those sanctions, encouraging companies to better monitor their own supply chains and, perhaps most importantly, trying to identify the third-party distributors taking these products and re-selling them to bad actors.
There is no evidence suggesting that any of those companies are running afoul of US sanctions laws and knowingly exporting their technology to Iran. Even with many companies promising increased monitoring, controlling where these highly ubiquitous parts end up in the global market is often very difficult for manufacturers.
The Biden administration recently ordered an investigation into how American parts got into Iranian drones.
Also, representatives of the US intelligence, Armed Forces and national security agencies have developed a special program. It aims to prevent Iran from producing drones, as well as to make it more difficult for Russians to launch kamikaze drones.