Iran says it recovered data from captured US drone

This file photo released in Decem­ber 2011 by the Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards claims to show the chief of the aero­space divi­sion of Iran’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, left, lis­ten­ing to an uniden­ti­fied colonel as he points to US RQ-170 Sen­tinel drone which Tehran says its forces downed ear­lier that week. (AP Photo/Sepahnews, File)

ALI AKBAR DAREINI

Asso­ci­ated Press

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran claimed Sun­day that it had recov­ered data from an Amer­i­can spy drone that went down in Iran last year, includ­ing infor­ma­tion that the air­craft was used to spy on Osama bin Laden weeks before he was killed. Iran also said it was build­ing a copy of the drone.

Sim­i­lar unmanned sur­veil­lance planes have been used in Afghanistan for years and kept watch on bin Laden’s com­pound in Pak­istan. But U.S. offi­cials have said lit­tle about the his­tory of the par­tic­u­lar air­craft now in Iran’s possession.

Tehran, which has also been known to exag­ger­ate its mil­i­tary and tech­no­log­i­cal prowess, says it brought down the RQ-170 Sen­tinel, a top-secret drone equipped with stealth tech­nol­ogy, and has flaunted the cap­ture as a vic­tory for Iran and a defeat for the United States.

The U.S. says the drone mal­func­tioned and down­played any sug­ges­tion that Iran could mine the air­craft for sen­si­tive infor­ma­tion because of mea­sures taken to limit the intel­li­gence value of drones oper­at­ing over hos­tile territory.

The drone went down in Decem­ber in east­ern Iran and was recov­ered by Iran almost com­pletely intact. After ini­tially say­ing only that a drone had been lost near the Afghan-Iran bor­der, Amer­i­can offi­cials even­tu­ally con­firmed the plane was mon­i­tor­ing Iran’s mil­i­tary and nuclear facilities.

Wash­ing­ton has asked for it back, a request Iran rejected.

The chief of the aero­space divi­sion of the pow­er­ful Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, told state tele­vi­sion that the cap­tured drone is a “national asset” for Iran and that he could not reveal full tech­ni­cal details.

But he did pro­vide some sam­ples of the data that he claimed Iran­ian experts had recov­ered from the air­craft, state tele­vi­sion reported.

“There is almost no part hid­den to us in this air­craft. We recov­ered part of the data that had been erased. There were many codes and char­ac­ters. But we deci­phered them by the grace of God,” Hajizadeh said.

Among the drone’s past mis­sions, he said, was sur­veil­lance of the com­pound in north­west Pak­istan where bin Laden lived. Hajizadeh claimed the drone flew over bin Laden’s com­pound two weeks before the al-Qaida leader was killed there in May 2011 by U.S. Navy SEALs.

He also listed tests and main­te­nance that the drone had under­gone, all of which, he said, had been recorded in the aircraft’s mem­ory. Accord­ing to Hajizadeh, the drone was taken to Cal­i­for­nia on Oct. 16, 2010, for “tech­ni­cal work” and then to Kan­da­har, Afghanistan, on Nov. 18, 2010.

He said it car­ried out flights from Afghanistan but ran into some prob­lems that U.S. experts were unable to fix. Then the drone was taken in Decem­ber 2010 to Los Ange­les, where the aircraft’s sen­sors under­went test­ing, Hajizadeh said.

“If we had not achieved access to soft­ware and hard­ware of this air­craft, we would be unable to get these details. Our experts are fully dom­i­nant over sec­tions and pro­grams of this plane,” he said.

Hajizadeh said he pro­vided the details to prove to the Amer­i­cans “how far we’ve pen­e­trated into this aircraft.”

The U.S. Defense Depart­ment said it does not dis­cuss intel­li­gence mat­ters and would not com­ment on the Iran­ian claims.

The semi­of­fi­cial Mehr news agency said Iran had reverse-engineered the air­craft and has begun using that knowl­edge to build a copy of the drone.

Sen. Joe Lieber­man, an inde­pen­dent from Con­necti­cut who chairs the Sen­ate Home­land Secu­rity and Gov­ern­men­tal Affairs Com­mit­tee, said on “Fox News Sun­day” that he views the reports with skepticism.

“There is a his­tory here of Iran­ian blus­ter, par­tic­u­larly, now when they are on the defen­sive because of the eco­nomic sanc­tions against them.”

He acknowl­edged that it was “not good for the U.S. when the drone went down in Iran and not good when the Ira­ni­ans grabbed it.” But the sen­a­tor said he did not “have con­fi­dence at this point that they are really able to make a copy of it.”

Iran has gone a long way in reverse-engineering some key tech­nolo­gies in the past three decades, par­tic­u­larly in the areas of nuclear and mis­sile technology.

Iran’s famous Shahab-3 mis­sile, first dis­played in 1998, is believed to be based on North Korea’s Nodong-1 design. Iran obtained its first cen­trifuge from Pak­istan in 1986 and later reverse-engineered it to develop its now advanced uranium-enrichment program.

Cen­trifuges, which purify ura­nium gas, are the cen­tral com­po­nent of a process that can make fuel for power plants or — at higher lev­els of pro­cess­ing — weapons.

How­ever, unlike the sit­u­a­tion with the drone, the Iran­ian gov­ern­ment usu­ally touts these achieve­ments as the result of an indige­nous, home-grown research.

One area where there is con­cern is whether Iran or other states could reverse-engineer the chem­i­cal com­po­si­tion of the drone’s radar-deflecting paint or the aircraft’s sophis­ti­cated optics tech­nol­ogy that allows oper­a­tors to pos­i­tively iden­tify ter­ror sus­pects from tens of thou­sands of feet in the air.

How much data there is on the drone is another ques­tion. Some sur­veil­lance tech­nolo­gies allow video to stream through to oper­a­tors on the ground but do not store much col­lected data. If they do, it is encrypted.

Media reports claimed this week that Rus­sia and China have asked Tehran to pro­vide them with infor­ma­tion on the drone, but Iran’s Defense Min­istry denied that.

Posted by AP News on Apr 22 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.