Recent news reports indicate that British-made thermal imaging device, the Thermovision 1000, was found by Israeli troops in Hezbollah bunkers in southern Lebanon. It is believed that these units were sold by Britain to Iran through a U.N. sponsored drug control program and were intended to assist the Iranian police in their efforts to interdict drug smuggling across the Iran-Afghanistan border.

The export to Iran would have required an end-use certificate from Iran which, it appears, the Iranians disregarded. A spokesman for the British Foreign Officer stated:

We view the diversion of materials which have been authorised for export very seriously

There is, perhaps, a bit of unintended irony in the spokesman’s statements. The British Government, when signing end-use certificates (Form DSP-83) for exports of defense articles from the United States to the United Kingdom, has accompanied those certificates with a reservation that the British government reserved the right to re-export those defense articles without authorization from the U.S. if the British Government deemed it in its interest to do so. This undercuts more than a little the Foreign Office’s protestations that Iran appears to have ignored the end-use certificates that it signed.

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