New reports on the CIA drone lost in Iran last week reveal the scope of the stealth plane's mission and just how far the U.S. was willing to go to recover it. The Associated Press reports on Wednesday that despite U.S. military statements Monday suggesting the drone was lost while flying a mission in western Afghanistan, Iranian officials say the RQ-170 drone was detected about 140 miles from the border of Afghanistan, deep inside the country's air space. U.S. officials, speaking on background, confirmed the RQ-170 drone had been spying on Iran for years but did not indicate the extent to which it penetrated Iranian air space. They did say the U.S. air base in Shindad, Afghanistan, was designed to launch "surveillance missions and even special operations missions into Iran if deemed necessary."
In a sign of how badly the U.S. wanted the stealth drone back, The Wall Street Journal reports that it contemplated three different operations to recover the fallen drone. One plan involved sending commandos in Afghanistan assisted by U.S. agents in Iran to track down and recover the drone. "Another option would have had a team sneak in to blow up the remaining pieces of the drone," reports the Journal. "A third option would have been to destroy the wreckage with an airstrike."
In the end, officials decided not to carry out the mission for two reasons: a) they feared the strike could be considered an "act of war" and b) it crashed in such a remote area of Iran that officials hoped it wouldn't be found "therefore, leaving the remains where they were could be the safest option."
So what went wrong? While Iran maintains that it shot down the plane using anti-aircraft weaponry, sources inside and outside the military explain to Reuters that most signs indicate a technical malfunction because of the way the RQ-170 is programmed. "The aircraft is flown remotely by pilots based in the United States, but is also programmed to autonomously fly back to the base it departed from if its data link with U.S.-based pilots is lost," a defense analyst who consults for Lockheed told the news agency. "The fact that the plane did not return to its base suggests a 'catastrophic' technical malfunction," another industry insider familiar with drone technology attested. Additionally, "several current and former defense officials" said shooting down the drone was unlikely because of the aircraft's anti-radar coating and ability to fly at high altitudes.
On the plus side, officials told The Journal they doubted Iran would be able to reverse engineer the complex craft and officials speaking to Reuters said the drone's computer files would likely be difficult to decipher as well. "If it survived a crash, all on-board computer equipment was heavily encrypted."
I'm no expert on drones, especially the RQ-170 but a few things strike me as odd.
1. Color. Why is it painted 'tan'? If it's operating at 50,000 ft it would be gray to black, I can't even begin to imagine why they would send it in low level unless the Iranian version of the Russian S-300 was having luck locking on to the 170 and the CIA needed to get close to something in the interior region of Iran.
2. Looks like the wings were almost taped on. Also, see the black marks/tape up front?
3. The under carriage was likely damaged or destroyed otherwise I'm sure they would be showing it.
I have to wonder if the Iranians didn't finally manage to hack the signal, they've had plenty of time to try. More likely something happened to make the CIA lose control and it ended up gliding in to a semi crash landing in Iran. However, if it landed in such a 'remote' area how did the Iranians find it so fast? Someone just happen to see it go down? Did they have it on radar or did they actually have semi control?
Some good points that I agree with from this article:
Its not inconceivable that perhaps it was intentionally "landed" to mislead the Iran government into thinking they accidentally got possession of what ~they believed~ was our latest technology, and so distract them from another covert operation being carried out in a different sector.
SIGINTEL has (we can hope!) come a long way from the early days where encryption codes could be easily broken. According to the above, if the "drone's computer files would likely be difficult to decipher," why would the CIA be so careless to not adapt the same caution with the control signal?
And…one has to ponder why it wouldn't be standard protocol to change and rotate encryption methods on a regular basis rather than using only one type of encryption for ~4 years~ to give the Iranians enough time to figure it out….not to mention carelessly leaving out a built-in subroutine for auto-destruct in the event of disruption so that the drone would not fall into enemy hands…..