According to a Ukrainian intelligence assessment obtained exclusively by CNN, parts manufactured by 13 American companies were found inside one Iranian drone shot down in Ukraine last fall.

Image of the Shahed 136 drone, which the Russians used to attack targets in UkrainePhoto: Oleksandr Gusev / Zuma Press / Profimedia

The assessment, which US government officials saw late last year, illustrates the scale of the problem facing the Biden administration, which has pledged to end the production of Iranian drones that Russia is launching in Ukraine.

The White House has created an administration-wide task force to investigate how technology developed in the U.S. and the West — from smaller hardware like semiconductors and GPS modules to larger parts like engines — ended up in Iranian drones.

According to the assessment, of the 52 components that the Ukrainians removed from the Iranian Shahed-136 drone, 40 are believed to have been manufactured by 13 different American companies.

The remaining 12 components are estimated to have been manufactured by companies in Canada, Switzerland, Japan, Taiwan and China.

Options for dealing with the problem are limited. The US has imposed strict export control restrictions and sanctions for years to prevent Iran from obtaining advanced materials. U.S. officials are now considering strengthening enforcement of those sanctions, encouraging companies to better monitor their own supply chains and, perhaps most importantly, trying to identify third-party distributors who take these products and then sell them.

Russia continues to purchase Western components for Orlan drones.

Incidentally, an investigation by Reuters and Russian media iStories in collaboration with the Royal Joint Services Institute, a London-based defense think tank, revealed a global logistics trail through which the St. Petersburg Center for Special Technologies, which makes the Orlan-10 drones, despite under sanctions, continues to receive Western components for the manufacture of these drones.

The sanctions, which took effect in 2017, prohibited any US citizen or resident or company from providing anything that could reach the Special Technology Center. In March of this year, the US government tightened these restrictions, blocking all sales of American products to any military end user, and effectively blocking all sales to Russia of high-tech goods such as microchips, communications and navigation equipment.

All this did not stop the production of the Orlan drone.