WASHINGTON, Iran, April 22, 2012 (AFP) – Boasts by Tehran Sunday that it has reverse-engineered a US spy drone amounts to little more than ’Iranian bluster’ said Senator Joe Lieberman, a leading US voice of defense and security matters.
An Iranian military commander said the Islamic republic was building a copy of the unmanned aircraft captured on Iranian soil in December 2011 but Lieberman said he felt ’skepticism’ at the claim, the first reaction from a senior US politician.
’There is some history here of Iranian bluster particularly now when they’re on the defensive because of our economic sanctions against them,’ the Democrat, chairman of the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee said.
Lieberman made his remarks to the ’Fox News Sunday’ program after General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the head of the Revolutionary Guards’ aerospatial division, told state television that the copy drone was under construction, and revealed what he said were ’codes’ gleaned from the unmanned aircraft.
’I am giving you four codes so the Americans understand just how far we have gone in penetrating the drone’s secrets,’ he said.
The unmanned, bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel drone went down in Iran four months ago, and Iran’s gleeful military proudly displayed it on state television apparently intact, though with what appeared to be damage to one of its wings.
Iran claimed one of its cyberwarfare team hacked its controls by confusing its GPS guidance system, and has said ever since it would reverse-engineer the drone to make its own.
US officials admitted they lost the drone on a CIA mission over Iran, but asserted the stealth aircraft came down because of a technical problem, not Iranian intervention.
While US President Barack Obama made a vain request for Iran to return the drone, his defence secretary, Leon Panetta, voiced skepticism over how much technological knowledge Tehran could gain from the aircraft.