U.S. questioned Czech-Syrian arms deal - Wikileaks

The United States queried the funding of a Czech arms company's supply of airplane parts to Syria in 2006, confidential diplomatic documents released by whistleblower website WikiLeaks have shown.

The U.S. government had concerns at the time that Syria was preparing to buy reactive engines for military training aircraft. It is not clear from the documents whether the deal referred to was ever made.

Czech military and aerospace equipment exporter Omnipol said it believed the documents referred to the supply of materials for airplane ejector seats.

"The cited reports from dispatches probably speak about the supply of rocket engines [pyropatrons] for pilots' ejecting from L-39 planes," Omnipol General Director Michal Hon told the Czech News Agency (ČTK) Dec. 2.

Hon said the deal had been made "entirely in harmony with Czech law," and that Omnipol had the consent of the Industry and Trade Ministry and other respective Czech authorities.

The United States also asked the Austrian government about the matter because they believed the transaction was to be funded by the Bank Austria Creditanstalt (BA/CA).

The Austrian government said BA/CA was not directly trading with Omnipol but the company had an account with its subsidiary HVB Czech, according to a dispatch from the U.S. Embassy in Vienna Feb. 17, 2006.

The dispatch said HVB needed BA/CA's consent for transactions exceeding 500,000 euros (12.5 million Kč). It included a statement from an unnamed high-ranking Austrian official that said the bank was only funding Omnipol's purchases of U.S. military equipment for the Czech military.

The Czech domestic intelligence service (BIS) revealed in its annual report for 2006 that "representatives of companies and official institutions" from Syria, North Korea and Iran had all been interested in Czech-based engineering equipment during that year.

Formerly a state company, Omnipol is one of the biggest Czech military and aviation equipment exporters, with profits of 1.4 billion Kč last year.

The leaked documents have also chronicled extensive lobbying by the Baltic states for a formal NATO defense plan for Europe in the wake of 2008's conflict between Russia and Georgia, The New York Times and The Guardian reported Dec. 6.

The communications show that NATO expanded plans to defend Poland by grouping it with Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in a new regional defense scheme code-named Eagle Guardian.

The cables said the military plans should not be discussed publicly as they might lead to an "unnecessary increase" in NATO-Russia tensions.

The Czech Republic is set to host an early-warning center to be built in or near Prague starting next year as part of revised missile-defense plans for the region. The Bush administration had planned a radar base for Brdy, about 90 kilometers southwest of Prague, in a project stiffly opposed by Russia. 

In another development, it has emerged the Czech government knew about the release by WikiLeaks of the confidential documents in general terms only.

U.S. State Department spokesman Philip Crowley told ČTK that U.S. embassies and State Department officials had contacted particular countries, including the Czech Republic, to describe the general nature of the respective documents' content.

The United States knew about the leak for months and carried out a thorough forensic analysis, Crowley said. The Foreign Affairs Ministry told journalists Nov. 29 it had been informed about the leak by the U.S. Embassy in Prague, without specifying further.

The U.S. Embassy in Prague has declined to comment on the leaked documents.

Meanwhile, the WikiLeaks website has been forced to move to Swiss domain Wikileaks.ch and a Swiss Internet provider, after domain-name provider EveryDNS.net withdrew service Dec. 2 over cyber attacks on the website and Amazon Web Services withdrew hosting facilities.

"[This] arises from the fact that Wikileaks.org has become the target of multiple distributed denial of service attacks," EveryDNS.net said in a statement after cutting off service to the whistleblower group.

"These attacks have, and future attacks would, threaten the stability of the EveryDNS.net infrastructure, which enables access to almost 500,000 other websites," the provider added.

In a statement Dec. 3, Amazon said it withdrew service because it could not host content that was not held legally under copyright law, and denied claims by WikiLeaks it had made the move after government pressure.

WikiLeaks has also been made available on hundreds of mirror sites hosted around the world that duplicate the site's content, including at least three in the Czech Republic.

The domain Wikileaks.ch is registered to the Swedish branch of the Pirate Party, an international movement advocating freedom of information and open government.

Jakub Michálek, a board member of Pirate Parties International as well as head of administration for the Czech Pirate Party, told The Prague Post the party is in full support of the WikiLeaks project. 

"We strongly believe freedom of the press is a value that deserves protection, and the people should have free access to information. If a situation happens that a server that is a primary source of information for journalists worldwide is attacked, we see it fit the information is copied and distributed to other servers," Michálek said, referring to the party's mirror of Wikileaks on its own website.

In an online statement, WikiLeaks said the mirrors were introduced because the site was "currently under heavy attack" and said the new sites would "make it impossible to ever fully remove WikiLeaks from the Internet."

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, meanwhile, turned himself in and appeared in court in London Dec. 7 vowing to fight extradition to Sweden, where he is accused of sexually assaulting two women.

He was denied bail and faces another court date Dec. 14.

WikiLeaks has been under attack since it began gradually publishing more than 250,000 classified communications by U.S. diplomatic services, causing controversy all over the world.

Bill Lehane can be reached at
blehane@praguepost.com