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Fresh documents released by WikiLeaks raise new questions about the five-day war between Russia and Georgia in 2008. In particular, the role of Israel and its involvement in providing military intelligence to Russia in the run-up to the war.

According to a leaked e-mail from an analyst at the intelligence firm Stratfor, Russia and Israel engaged in a deal in 2008 in which Jerusalem provided the Kremlin with secret codes for Georgian UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in exchange for information on Iranian missile systems. In the e-mail, a Stratfor analyst says "Israel and Russia made a swap – Israel gave Russia the ‘data link’ code for those specific UAVs; in return, Russia gave Israel the codes for Iran’s Tor-M1s." In 2008, that 'data link' code was allegedly used by the Russians to take down a Georgian drone flying in Georgian air space, a defining moment in the months before the war.

As many have noted, any information gleaned from Stratfor e-mails should be taken with a grain of salt but the swap scenario is certainly plausible. The Russians would've been an ideal source of information for Israel, as Yaakov Lappin at The Jerusalem Post reports, because they sold Iran 29 launch vehicles carrying batteries of surface-to-air missiles in 2005, which make up Iran's Tor-M1 defense system. The source who provided the information to Stratfor is ranked "A," which according to its glossary, is the highest rank, meaning "Someone with intimate knowledge of the particular insight." The particular item of intelligence is ranked '1' meaning "We can take this info to the bank."