Iran's Press TV on Thursday
broadcast an extended video
tour of the U.S. spy drone that went down in the
country--and it indeed appeared to look mostly intact.
American officials have acknowledged that an unmanned U.S.
reconnaissance plane was lost on a
mission late last week, but have
insisted that there is no evidence
the drone was downed by hostile acts by Iran. Rather,
they said, the drone likely went down because of a malfunction, and
they implied the advanced stealth reconnaissance plane would likely
have fallen from such a high altitude--the RQ-170 Sentinel can fly
as high as 50,000 feet--that it wouldn't be in good shape.
But Iranian military officials have claimed since Sunday that
they brought down an American spy drone that was little damaged.
And now they have provided the first visual images of what looks to
be a drone that at least outwardly appears to be in decent
condition, in what is surely another humiliating poke in the eye
for U.S. national security agencies.
The Pentagon declined to comment on the released images
Thursday, a Defense Department spokesman told Yahoo News. But
military analysts said it appeared to them to be the American drone
in question.
"I have been doing this for thirty years, and it sure looks
like" a stealthy U.S. drone to me," Loren Thompson, a military
analyst with the Lexington Institute and consultant to the RQ-170's
manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, told Yahoo News in a telephone
interview Thursday. "I think we are going to face the high
likelihood that Iran has an intact version of one of our most
important intelligence gathering tools."
Still, Thompson went on, the intelligence "windfall" to Iran
from obtaining the advanced U.S. stealthy drone may be
mitigated.
"I don't think the Iranians get as much out of it as they might
hope," he said. "It probably came into their hands as a result of a
technical malfunction. What that means is they still don't have a
real defense against the U.S. flying other vehicles that have
similar capabilities, without much fear of interception."
Analysts also noted that the video of the drone released by Iran
did not show the drone's underside. "Pretty intact," the Center for
Strategic and International Studies' James Lewis said by email.
"Interesting that they covered the underside."
The New York Times
reported Thursday
that--unsurprisingly--the RQ-170 was lost while making the latest
foray over Iran during an extended CIA surveillance effort of
Iran's nuclear and ballistic weapons program.
"The overflights by the bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel, built by
Lockheed Martin and first glimpsed on an airfield in Kandahar,
Afghanistan, in 2009, are part of an increasingly aggressive
intelligence collection program aimed at Iran, current and former
officials say," the Times' Scott Shane and David Sanger wrote. "The
urgency of the effort has been underscored by a recent public
debate in Israel about whether time is running out for a military
strike to slow Iran's progress toward a nuclear weapon."
Iran in turn has complained that the drone overflights represent
an act of aggression and violation of its sovereignty, and
summoned the Swiss
envoy--who represents U.S. interests in Iran--on Thursday to lodge
a protest.
However, while the images of the U.S. drone surely allowed Iran
to score another public relations blow against Washington, Iran may
find it tough to generate much in the way of international sympathy
for being the target of U.S. surveillance.
Last week, Iranian hardliners ransacked the British embassy in
Tehran, prompting the United Kingdom to recall its diplomatic staff
from Tehran and order Iran's embassy in London closed. Last month,
the UN atomic watchdog agency issued a report raising concerns
about research Iran is suspected by some nations to have conducted
before 2003 on military aspects of its nuclear program. Iran has
insisted its nuclear program is for peaceful energy purposes. In
October, the United States accused elements of Iran's Qods force of
plotting to assassinate the Saudi envoy to the United States. The
United Nations General Assembly voted last month in favor of a
resolution condemning the Iranian plot.
Amid its growing international isolation, Iran, unsurprisingly,
seemed intent to play up the drone incident for all it could.
"China, Russia want to inspect downed U.S. drone,"
proclaimed a headline from Iran's
Mehr news agency Thursday.
The RQ-170 Sentinel, however, reportedly did not use the latest
U.S. surveillance technology on board, in part because as a
single-engine aircraft, it was thought more likely to occasionally
go down.
"The basic principles of stealthy aircraft are fairly well
known," Thompson said. "In terms of [the drone's] on-board
electronics and information systems, it is fairly routine in combat
to require authentication codes to make them hard to unlock."