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 …
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. Relations between the United States and China were growing worse, and officials from the US National Security Agency were making the rounds in Europe, warning companies to avoid working closely with companies tied to Beijing. The decision by TDC Holding A/S, Denmark’s dominant telecommunications company, would carry symbolic value beyond the contract’s roughly $200 million price tag. It would also be a test of the effectiveness of the Trump administration’s blunt diplomacy and its hawkish efforts to slow the growth of China’s influence around the world.