U.S. Made Covert Plan to Retrieve Iran Drone

[jakeXT]

Source: WSJ

U.S. officials considered conducting a covert mission inside Iran to retrieve or destroy a stealth drone that crashed late last week, but ultimately concluded such a secret operation wasn't worth the risk of provoking a more explosive clash with Tehran, a U.S. official said.

...

But the U.S. official said the drone developed mechanical difficulties and remote pilots lost control of the aircraft, and said officials knew immediately it had crashed in eastern Iran.

...

Under one plan, a team would be sent to retrieve the aircraft. U.S. officials considered both sending in a team of American commandos based in Afghanistan as well as using allied agents inside Iran to hunt down the downed aircraft.

Another option would have had a team sneak in to blow up the remaining pieces of the drone. A third option would have been to destroy the wreckage with an airstrike.



Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204770404577082822643123332.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

[orpupilofnature57]

1. How is a drone different than a Mitsubishi? 70 yrs of history.

JFK Knew it was wrong ,tyranny inn the name of peace.

[lamp_shade]

2. Wouldn't you think those things would have some kind of "self destruct" feature?

[Ian David]

6. I had the same thought. It doesn't even need to be an explosive.

A corrosive acid that damages the chips and circuit boards would be better than nothing.

Then again...

Maybe we WANTED them to capture it?

[Kolesar]

3. IIRC, Iranian weapons are used to attack Israel

What is Iran's national security interest in that conflict?
Uh, not much

[jakeXT]

4. what conflict?

[Kolesar]

5. Somebody is bombing Israel...eom

[Robb]

7. Boy, WSJ and Fox really have the inside scoop on this story, eh?

They have all the best unnamed officials. :D

[chervilant]

8. hmm...

Seems like the drone manufacturers could build in a self-destruct option for events such as these...

[jakeXT]

9. A blog post, I don't know about the accuracy.

First of all he said that Sentinel has no self-kill switch hence self-destruction is not part of the procedure intended to take care of a lost ‘bot.

Then, he added:

“Temporary loss of satellite connection is common and the drone will orbit on a preplanned route until connection is re-established. If the connection is never re-established then the aircraft will eventually run out of fuel and crash. This can happen if the the encryption keys are invalidated during rollover and were not properly loaded (among other possibilities). Prior to fuel exhaustion, standard procedure is to perform classified data erase, followed by software data erase. A recovery team is supposed to follow up and secure it or blow it up.

http://theaviationist.com/2011/12/07/rq170-iran/

[chervilant]

10. Interesting...

So, they do have a protocol for destroying drones that crash in 'enemy' territory?

[alp227]

11. heres an NY Times article about this...

"Drone Crash in Iran Reveals Secret U.S. Surveillance Effort"