Tehran says copying US drone, reveals ‘codes’

TEHRAN

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh (L) listening to a colonel as he points to US RQ-170 Sentinel drone. AP photo

Iran claimed yesterday it had reverse-engineered an American spy drone captured by its armed forces last year and has begun building a copy of the aircraft.

Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, chief of the aerospace division of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, shared what he said were details of the aircraft’s operational history to prove his claim that Tehran’s military experts had extracted data from the United States’ RQ-170 Sentinel captured in December of last year in eastern Iran, state television reported.

Tehran has flaunted the capture of the Sentinel, a top-secret surveillance drone with stealth technology, as a victory for Iran and a defeat for the U.S. in a complicated battle of intelligence and technology. U.S. officials have acknowledged losing the drone, but have said Iran will find it hard to exploit any data and technology aboard it due to measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones operating over hostile territory. “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.

Bin Laden operation

According to Hajizadeh all operations carried out by the drone had been recorded in the memory of the aircraft, including maintenance and testing. Hajizadeh claimed that the drone flew over Osama Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan two weeks before the al-Qaida leader was killed there in May 2011 by U.S. Navy SEALs, although did not say how the Iranian experts knew this.

Before that, he said, “this drone was in California on Oct. 16, 2010, for some technical work and was taken to Kandahar in Afghanistan on Nov. 18, 2010. It conducted flights there but apparently faced problems and [U.S. experts] were unable to fix it,” he said. Hajizadeh said the drone was taken to Los Angeles in December 2010 where sensors of the aircraft underwent testing at an aerospace factory.
“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. “It’s not that we can bring down a drone but cannot recover the data.”

There are concerns in the U.S. that Iran, or other states, may be able to reverse-engineer the chemical composition of the drone’s radar-deflecting paint or the aircraft’s sophisticated optics technology which allows operators to positively identify terror suspects from tens of thousands of feet in the air. There are also worries that adversaries may be able to hack into the drone’s database, as Iran claimed to have done. 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.