Does Iran Actually Have One of Our Drones or Are They Showing Off a Fake?

Iranian officials claim this is the US RQ-170 Sentinel high-altitude reconnaissance drone that crashed in Iran on 4 December. Photograph: AFP

I've searched a bit on the most definitive answer as to whether the Iranian government is now in possession of an intact U.S. spy drone and the answer is still conflicting. I have two articles that speak to the matter, one is from the BBC that says this:

Iranian TV has shown the first video footage of an advanced US drone aircraft that Tehran says it downed near the Afghan border.

Images show Iranian military officials inspecting the RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft which appears to be undamaged.

US officials have acknowledged the loss of the unmanned plane, saying it had malfunctioned.

However, Iranian officials say its forces electronically hijacked the drone and steered it to the ground.

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner says the intact condition of the Sentinel tends to support their claim.

But look at this section of the report at The Guardian:

The aircraft shown on Iranian television looked like the RQ-170 Sentinel made by Lockheed Martin, first spotted in Afghanistan in 2007. The same type of drone was used to provide surveillance of Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan before the May raid that killed the al-Qaida leader.

However, John Pike, an expert on military hardware at the GlobalSecurity.org thinktank in northern Virginia, said it was highly unlikely the Iranians had the technology to wrest control of the drone's navigation and bring it down so softly that it was left with barely a scratch.

"It looks like a parade float. For one thing, it looked remarkably intact for something that crashed, and the wings are drooping the wrong way.

"On the real thing, the wings go up at the end. This one's wings droop down," Pike said.

So do the Iranians have our drone or not? Well, for obvious reasons, the CIA and U.S. officials aren't saying much but I have seen the video and you can see it just below this post and if that isn't a fake, it was an amazing landing of that drone by the Iranians. It's one thing to "commandeer" a drone away from our pilots, it's a whole 'nother thing to bring it down to a soft three point landing. Also, when you view the video, it looks fabricated to me. And it sounds from the expert above that in recreating it, the Iranians messed up on their "redesign" a little bit.

I really am just making a stab here but I think we lost the drone, I think it crashed and I think the Iranians have some chunks of it. But that's all.

Authenticity of Iranian captured US drone questioned


Iran's Revolutionary Guard have displayed an aircraft that they claimed was a US drone brought down over Iranian airspace. They said on Thursday it was downed by electronic means.

The US conceded it lost a drone based in western Afghanistan, which American newspaper reports said was part of a intensive surveillance campaign aimed at detecting a covert Iranian nuclear weapons programme. But weapons experts questioned the authenticity of the aircraft put on show by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).

In footage broadcast on Iranian television, two senior IRGC officers are seen inspecting the sand-coloured bat-wing aircraft, which appears intact.

The head of the IRGC air force, Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, said: "Recently, our collected intelligence and precise electronic monitoring revealed that this aircraft intended to infiltrate our country's airspace for spying missions. After it entered the eastern parts of the country, this aircraft fell into the trap of our armed forces and was downed in Iran with minimum damage."

The Iranians said the aircraft, a RQ-170 Sentinel drone, had a 26-metre wingspan and was 4.5 metres long, and had been brought down 140 miles inside Iran, near the town of Kashmar.

"The drone is equipped with highly advanced surveillance, data gathering, electronic communication and radar systems," the general said.

The aircraft shown on Iranian television looked like the RQ-170 Sentinel made by Lockheed Martin, first spotted in Afghanistan in 2007. The same type of drone was used to provide surveillance of Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan before the May raid that killed the al-Qaida leader.

However, John Pike, an expert on military hardware at the GlobalSecurity.org thinktank in northern Virginia, said it was highly unlikely the Iranians had the technology to wrest control of the drone's navigation and bring it down so softly that it was left with barely a scratch.

"It looks like a parade float. For one thing, it looked remarkably intact for something that crashed, and the wings are drooping the wrong way.

"On the real thing, the wings go up at the end. This one's wings droop down," Pike said.

Other weapons experts speculated that the US drone could have been brought down by a Russian jamming and electronic warfare system called Avtobaza which Iran is reported to have bought from Moscow in the past few months.

Peter Singer, an expert on military robotics at the Brookings Institution in Washington said: "We have had drones whose computer programmes have gone wrong. We have accidentally jammed our own drones when they passed over convoys with IED [improvised explosive device] jamming devices, and we do know that the Iranians have got hold of some really good gear. So there are competing narratives."

The New York Times and the Washington Post reported that the lost RQ-170 was part of an increased US surveillance effort monitoring suspect nuclear sites in Iran, in the search for a parallel covert weapons programme that western policymakers fear may be hidden in tunnels and mine-shafts. Iran denies it has any such programme, insisting its nuclear programme is for exclusively peaceful purposes.

Unlike satellites, which can stay above a location for only a few minutes, drones have the capacity to linger over a particular site for hours, allowing intelligence analysts to observe patterns of activity there on which to base an assessment of its purpose. The drones may also be equipped with sensors to detect radioactive isotopes.

US press reports said that the American military had considered a special forces mission to retrieve the wreckage, but the operation was considered too risky.