The Pentagon just brushed aside the claims.
Brig. Gen. Amir-Ali Haji-zadeh, the commander of the Pasdar air force, announced some of the intelligence extracted from the drone in an effort to prove that he was telling the truth.
“I am providing four elements to let the Americans know how deep we can penetrate into this drone,” he said.
He said the drone parts had been sent to California for technical work in October 2010, that the drone was later sent to Qandahar, Afghanistan, in November 2010 and made a flight from there.
He said the aircraft experienced some technical challenges on that flight that the American maintenance staff were unable to resolve at Qandahar.
He said the drone was sent back to Los Angeles in December 2010 for further work, and a number of test flights were made to check out the repairs.
Hajizadeh then said that the plane’s memory device showed it had been flown over the Pakistani hideout of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden two weeks before he was killed there.
The general said, “There is almost no part that is hidden from us in this aircraft. We even recovered part of the data that had been erased. There were many codes and characters. But we deciphered them all by the grace of God.”
He said he would not reveal more because “the aircraft is regarded as a national asset and Ö discussing it would be a disclosure of information that we should not dispense freely.”
American sources told the Iran Times the details, assuming they were true, did not prove that Iran had cracked any US codes. “All he talked about were maintenance and flight records,” the source said. “He didn’t talk about classified work. The maintenance and flight records would not be encrypted because the ground staff who operate and repair the aircraft don’t have access to codes.”
Going back to December, other officials have said the RQ-170 stealth drone does not carry much information. It spies on the ground, encodes what it sees and transmits it back to a central base. The information, they said, is at the central base, not on the aircraft.
The main concern with the aircraft isn’t that Iran will learn what it did. It is that Iran will learn something about the technology on board. Even there, the main concern is that Iran will allow Russian and Chinese technicians to get their hands on the aircraft, not that the Islamic Republic would be able to do anything with it.
Some officials have said the main technology they do not want to see compromised is the composition of the special materials with which the plane is painted. It is that soft material that absorbs radar signals so they are not reflected back to reveal the presence of the aircraft.
Ahmad Karimpur, an adviser to Iran’s defense minister, said last week that Tehran has received requests from many countries for information on the RQ-170, with China and Russia being the most insistent. Iranian officials said the same thing back in December when Russia denied every having approached Iran about the drone.
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta brushed aside the claims. “Based on my experience, I would seriously question their ability to do what they say they have done.”
US Senator Joseph Lie-berman, independent of Connecticut, also said he didn’t believe Iran’s claims. “There’s a history of Iranian bluster, particularly now when they’re on the defensive because of our economic sanctions against them.”
Dennis Gormley, an expert on drones and cruise missiles at the University of Pittsburgh, told The New York Times, “As someone who does monitor Iranian aerospace and missile claims closely, let me simply observe that they are preternaturally disposed to exaggerate.”
The United States said the plane had a malfunction and got away from the control of its remote pilot. The Islamic Republic claimed that it took over the controls of the plane and made it land at an Iranian landing site. A detailed explanation said Iran fooled the plane on its longitude, having it land at the same latitude as its base in Afghanistan but at a longitude to the west in Iran. However, the latitude of the landing site announced by Iran was far away from the drone’s base at Shindand in Afghanistan, so the explanation fell apart.