Iran claimed Sunday that it had recovered data from an
American spy drone that went down in Iran last year including that it
was used to spy on Osama bin Laden's house weeks before he was killed by U.S. forces. Iran also said it was building a copy of the surveillance aircraft.
This type of drone has been used in Afghanistan for years and was used to keep watch on bin Laden's compound in Pakistan
but U.S. officials have said little about the history of the particular
drone now in Iran's possession. Iran has also been known to exaggerate
its military or technological prowess.
Tehran says it brought down the RQ-170 Sentinel, a top-secret surveillance drone
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 last December in eastern Iran
and was recovered by Iran almost completely intact. After initially
saying only that it had lost a drone operating near the Afghan-Iran
border, U.S. officials eventually confirmed the drone 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 surveillance 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 in
which bin Laden lived and was killed. 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 a
litany of 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 to Los
Angeles in December 2010 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
semi-official 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. Look,
it was not good for the U.S. when the drone went down in Iran and not
good when the Iranians grabbed it. I don't have confidence at this
point that they are really able to make a copy of it," Lieberman said.
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 this.