When a Huawei Bid Turned Into a Hunt for a Corporate Mole

At TDC in Copenhagen, senior managers were potential suspects. The company’s offices were compromised, people were getting tailed. And then there were the drones …

Jordan Robertson and

Drake Bennett

June 15, 2023 at 4:00 PM PDT

At a hastily scheduled meeting on March 5, 2019, the bidding to upgrade Denmark’s cellular network crossed over into something strange. Negotiations for telecommunications infrastructure are high-stakes affairs; the deals, worked out in private, determine which companies are entrusted to embed their equipment and staff at the deepest levels of a country’s phone and internet systems. But the talks over the Danish contract, which had stretched through the winter, had been particularly fraught.
As it prepared to make the leap to a 5G wireless network, Denmark’s telecom sector had become the object of a backroom economic proxy conflict. . ."

816 views Jun 16, 2023

When Chinese tech giant Huawei learned it was set to lose a $200 million contract, a run-of-the-mill equipment deal spiraled into a saga of hidden microphones, drone encounters and covert surveillance, according to investigators for a Danish telecoms firm. Bloomberg reporters crisscrossed Copenhagen for the tale of TDC’s 5G showdown, in which technology, business and national security collide.