An undated picture received on December 8, 2011 shows a member of Iran’s revolutionary guard (R) pointing at the U.S. RQ-170 unmanned spy plane as he speaks with Amirali Hajizadeh, a revolutionary guard commander, at an unknown location in Iran. The unmanned U.S. drone Iran said on Sunday it had captured was programmed to automatically return to base even if its data link was lost, one key reason that U.S. officials say the drone likely malfunctioned and was not downed by Iranian electronic warfare. (Reuters)
The Iranian regime says it is in possession of US secrets after it brought down an RQ-170 UAV drone in a “cyber-attack” last weekend.
Fars News reported:
The US stealth drone which was downed by Iran last week provided Tehran’s military forces with valuable intelligence data and information.
The RQ-170 UAV, dubbed The Beast of Kandahar by some media outlets, was flying over eastern Iran when the Iranian forces gained its control through a cyber attack and brought it down almost intact.
Initially, US officials denied the event, but then several options on how to react to the loss of the drone were considered, including sending a cross-border commando raid to either retrieve or destroy what was left of the surveillance craft, and delivering an air strike at the crash site.
However all were deemed too risky, since Tehran would consider such an operation an act of war, should it be discovered.
“No one warmed up to the option of recovering it or destroying it because of the potential it could become a larger incident,” an unnamed official told the Washington Post.
The US first denied that the UAV could have been the victim of an Iranian hacking operation or brought down by other means. The Americans alleged that the crash damaged the drone badly enough that no secret technology could be reverse-engineered from the debris.
But Iran made all the US claims futile after it aired images and footages of the aircraft which showed that its surveillance device is almost intact.
Americans are trying to make the world believe that the drone is not much important or Iran cannot use it, but the fact that the US had three scenarios to retrieve or destroy it reveals that Washington is worried that Iran can access not only the aircraft technology, but also its top secret information.
