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Subscribe to RSSNBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports on the American stealth drone that crashed in Iran and whether it provides Iranians access to sensitive U.S. technology.
An American drone that crashed in Iran last Thursday was on a mission for the CIA, and is now in the hands of Iran’s military, NBC News has learned.
U.S. officials tell NBC that CIA operators were flying the unmanned drone when it veered out of control and headed deep into Iran. The drone eventually ran out of fuel and crashed in Iran's remote mountains.
The nature of the drone’s mission was secret and sources say it's still not clear whether the drone was operating in Iran or Afghanistan.
Officials here confirm that the vehicle was a highly secret stealth drone called an RQ-170, which looks more like a flying wing than an airplane — the same kind of drone that circled over Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan as Navy Seals targeted the fugitive al-Qaida leader.
One major concern is that the Iranians could salvage highly sensitive technology used in the drone for cameras or sensors or even the stealth technology, and try to develop it for themselves.
Iranian media reported on Sunday that their country's military had shot down a U.S. reconnaissance drone in eastern Iran, but a U.S. official said there was no indication the aircraft had been shot down.
Iran has announced several times in the past that it shot down U.S., Israeli or British drones, in incidents that did not provoke high-profile responses.
"Iran's military has downed an intruding RQ-170 American drone in eastern Iran," Iran's Arabic-language Al Alam state television network on Sunday quoted a military source as saying.
"The spy drone, which has been downed with little damage, was seized by the Iranian armed forces," the source said. "The Iranian military's response to the American spy drone's violation of our airspace will not be limited to Iran's borders."
Iranian officials were not available to comment further.
The incident comes at a time when Tehran is trying to contain foreign outrage at the storming of the British embassy on Tuesday, after London announced sanctions on Iran's central bank in connection with Iran's nuclear enrichment program.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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This is Iran's Roswell. Too bad it will take them 50 years to reproduce it....
It went down with little damage because -despite their silly boasting- the Iranians didn't HIT IT. ;)
Maybe they did. The hing was out of control and on its way down, possibly with no engines.
The defense budget of US DOD is always on the top of the world and the DOD is 6 times more than the China to which the China military expense is on the second of the world.
It is glad that there is no personnel on the plane.
Keep the focus on our own soil.
I realize the idiots in the chain of command were hopeful that the drone would not be found and that they would recover it without Iran knowing about it bit lets be real...as soon as control was lost and it entered Iranian airspace an announcement should have been made. Both to the press and Iran.
Without that why would anyone believe the craft wasn't spying on Iran?
I hope everyone knows that Iran will not return this drone.. I have to ask why everyone in the U.S. thinks Iran would like us,would we have a spy plane or drone fly over the u.s.a. without shooting it down? why would any other country not shoot a unauthorized aircraft or vessel that enters there air or water space not be shot down or distroyed... i know we would shot down another countrys plane. i see where we are laundran money for the drug cartel in mexico. nothing happens there...even a U.S. border patrol agent gets killed and nothing happens,business as usually,something wrong there....
The found it intact but a government sponsored group broke into it and ransacked it and burned it apparantly in the Persian lanquage "drone" and "embassy" sound a lot alike.
Genius! Who's idea was it to test fly our most advanced, secret, and unproven stealth drone technology around one of the most hostile countries in the world? Their Proof of Concept Plan needs a dose of common sense. Brilliant!
You're joking right? It's been proven over the last few years flying around in the war zones... And the point of a spy drone is to spy... Would you rather we keep it on the tarmac in some base? Or maybe in American airspace spying on its own citizens... o.O
They called it a "test" drone, which to me means it was not fully signed off on for active duty, which surely takes years of testing. We have plenty of other spy hardware in our goody bad that works just fine. I just question why are we playing with war while trying to use test versions of new equipment? Why risk it? ...just saying
i dont get it. ever since we nailed bin laden it's like we cant do anything right.
i sometimes think the military is trying to make obama a one termer by blowing it every chance they get.
Doubt it George. He, after all, is bringing home our men and women after they have spent years fighting a war that was a lie from the beginning thanks to GWB Jr and Dick. If anything they love OUR PRESIDENT. Loser.
They should have Nuked Tehran to keep it out of Government hands.
Some goat herder has it and now has a new roof for his goats.
I thought all high-tech stuff like, UAVs, Drones, Aircraft, etc... came with a self-destruct protocol! If this is true, why can't we just blow the thing up! That way Iran, China, Russia, can't get their hands on the technology and the US gets a pretty good body count!
The Iranian knuckle draggers don't have the first idea of how to replicate this technology. However, the Chinese, who somehow got a look at the super secret coptor that crashed during the Osama raid do. Couple all this with Slick Willy's presentation to the Chicoms of our missile guidance technology and we have the dems to thanks a bunch for our national insecurity.
Excuse me neighbor, could you throw my toy airplane back over the fence? Oh that's right, we weren't very neighborly when we picked a brutal shah to support while his secret police killed and maimed citizens...
Holy Crap, how much planning and intelligence would it take to put auto destruct on these drones, so if they lose communication for more than a minute, they blow up? This is about as stupid as the Mars Explorer that crashed because it was programmed in metric (meters) instead of English (feet).
I can see the headlines now "Self destruct on drone misfires killing four air-force personnel". That's probably why they don't do it.
No s**t, yestreday they said nothing was missing???
They are backward, but not that backward. The fact that it had minimal damage speaks to the fact that they jammed the radio and took some sort of rudimentary radio control and flew it into their territory.
Oh comon like any American built drone is by any means top secret engineering anymore. The day the internet was invented was the day we began publishing every known secret this country had left. All is Iran, China, The Soviet Union has to do is log onto a computer and Google "drone construction" and a complete set of blue prints will probably pop up on their screens. Just like how Al Queda were able to look up the blue prints to The Twin Towers. On their first attempt they knew ahead of time where to park the van full of explosives in the tower basement in hopes of destroying the weakest bearing points holding the towers up. On the second attempt they looked at how each floor was built with a cross member latched truss system of steel that would easily detatch with extreme heat from burning jet fuel found on commuter planes. So to say this drone was top secret by any means is a complete falsification.
As a matter of fact, any enemy country that are ready to topple The United States can do so with the use of architectural drawings avaialble on the internet through any home computer, I Pad or cell phone. To think we Americans praise inventors like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniack and Mark Zuckerberg as heroes of innovation. It is these idiots that have made it possible for any enemy country of the US to take direct aim at our least protected cities, ports, freeways, tunnels and shipping lanes with nothing more than the click of a few computer keys. I have to ask myself did these guys that invented "search engines" alone ever even consider just how dangerous free information might be to our enemies?..
Well the Iranian leadership better hurry up and figure out how to reverse engineer the thing before the next wave of drones takes them out.
What a surprise. Other countries watching Iran. Now they Iran has another tool to spy on their own citizens with.
Can you say Trojan Horse...!!!!
It's amazing to me. The brilliant technology that has been developed here and yet we always seem to overlook the most obvious things. "What happens if one of our drones is captured"? Billions of dollars in research goes up and smoke. The Chinese, Russian and Iranians are on this thing like bugs. There should have been a fail safe system in place. The drones move at such slow speed, it was only a matter of time. To the Defense team in Washington, I want to give a rousing BOO!! I pray that we don't go to war, God only knows how many systems will fail during during real conflict.
As long as they don't have one of our Alien Spacecrafts we are still good to go.
C'mon, Iran hacked the controlling signals and flew it to one of their bases. Iran has tons of really smart engineers- an easy feat for them.
Not sure if this is sarcasm or not:
"C'mon, Iran hacked the controlling signals and flew it to one of their bases. Iran has tons of really smart engineers- an easy feat for them."
Would those be the same 'really smart' engineers that didn't know there was a virus in their computers that was wrecking centrifuges for nearly a year? Oh, that's right - the smart ones were the ones executed as the Iranians panicked and started looking for spies in their ranks.
Why does our government have such a tough time just giving us the straight scoop. Incompetence on our part. Controllers must be smoking dope just like at home.
If they were smoking dope... Then it would have been a Non-Violent Drone..! LMFAO