A US official says Iran will find it hard to exploit any data and technology aboard the captured CIA stealth drone because of measures taken to limit the intelligence value of drones operating over hostile territory.
The official also said Saturday that despite Iran’s latest claims to have hijacked the RQ-170 Sentinel and brought it down near the eastern Iranian city of Kashmar, the US is convinced that the drone malfunctioned. “The Iranians had nothing to do with it,” the official said.
The official, who could speak about classified matters only on condition of anonymity, did not provide details. But independent experts say the data and communications of the unmanned aircraft are heavily encrypted, making it difficult for Iran to harvest much intelligence from them. US officials previously have said the drones have no self-destruct mechanism.
An engineer said Iran’s electronic warfare specialists jammed the RQ-170’s satellite communications link and tricked its autopilot into thinking that it was landing at its base in Afghanistan when it touched down in Iran. “The GPS navigation is the weakest point,” the engineer was quoted as saying.
US officials say Iran merely picked up a drone — or large pieces of one — that had lost contact with its controllers and landed inside Iranian borders relatively intact.
Ted Beneigh, an expert on unmanned aircraft systems at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, said it was “highly unlikely” that the Iranians have a system that could interfere with the RQ-170’s GPS navigation system.
The US drone, Beneigh wrote in an email, would have used “military GPS frequencies, whose timing and code sequence is classified. Commercial GPS repeaters operate on civilian frequencies.”
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said this week that even if Iran can reverse-engineer the captured technology by the time they finish it may be obsolete.
Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi on Saturday told IRNA, Iran’s official news agency, that Tehran had delayed announcement of the captured drone, which it displayed on Iranian television Dec. 8, to test US reaction to the loss.
After initially saying only that it had lost a drone operating near the Afghan-Iran border, U.S. officials eventually confirmed that Iran had captured a drone sent to monitor Iran’s military and nuclear programmes.
Source: The Washington Examiner