The unmanned surveillance aircraft lost by the United States in Iran was indeed a stealth aircraft being used for secret missions by the CIA, US officials admitted on Monday.
US officials told NBC that CIA operators were flying the unmanned aircraft when it suddenly veered out of control and headed deep into Iran. It eventually ran out of fuel and crashed in Iran’s remote mountains.
The nature of the drone’s mission was secret and sources say it’s still not clear whether the drone was operating in Iran or Afghanistan.
The officials said that Iran’s military appears to be in possession of one of the more sensitive surveillance platforms in the CIA’s fleet. The mission of the downed drone remains unclear. The RQ-170 has been used by the CIA for highly sensitive missions into other nations’ airspace, including months of surveillance of the compound in Pakistan in which Osama bin Laden was hiding before he was killed in a May raid by Special Operations forces.
A CIA spokeswoman declined to comment on whether the drone was being flown by the agency. A Pentagon spokesman, George Little, also declined to comment.
The disclosure that the drone apparently recovered by Iran was being flown by the CIA comes after previous signals from US officials that had created the impression that the plane was being flown by the US military on a more mundane mission over Afghanistan and had simply strayed into Iranian territory. A statement issued by the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan on Sunday said that the downed drone “may be a US unarmed reconnaissance aircraft that had been flying a mission over western Afghanistan late last week. The operators of the UAV lost control of the aircraft and had been working to determine its status.”
US officials insisted Monday that the statement was technically accurate, noting that it did not explicitly assert that the aircraft was being operated by ISAF or the US military. Instead, the language of the statement was ambiguous about the drone’s ownership and mission. The CIA’s role in operating the plane was first reported Monday by NBC News.
Some US officials began to cast doubt on the ISAF statement almost as soon as it was released. Current and former US defence officials said it was unlikely that the military would be using a highly sophisticated stealth aircraft – one presumably in relatively short supply – for surveillance operations over western Afghanistan.
The statement’s suggestion that US pilots lost control of the aircraft was accurate, according to US officials who have disputed claims by Iran that its defense forces downed the aircraft, or that it had been felled by a sophisticated cyberattack.
Although the ISAF statement said that the drone was flying “a mission over western Afghanistan,” CIA drones are generally used to conduct surveillance as well as strikes beyond that country’s borders, most notably in Pakistan. The agency’s aircraft do take off from and land at air bases in Afghanistan, however.
One major concern is that the Iranians could salvage highly sensitive technology used in the drone for cameras or sensors or even the stealth technology, and try to develop it for themselves.
Sources: The Washington Post; NBC
Has anyone wondered if the US purposely intended for the drone to be seized by Iran? Perhaps just to see what Iran would do with it, or to retrieve remote data with the drone? In other words, the drone is more or less a trojan horse that the Iranians believe they seized.