How They Did It

In an exclusive story in the Christian Science Monitor an Iranian engineer explains how the Iranians managed to hijack a top-secret American surveillance drone and land it in Iran.

Here's the lede:

Iran guided the CIA's "lost" stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the US military, according to an Iranian engineer now working on the captured drone's systems inside Iran.

Iranian electronic warfare specialists were able to cut off communications links of the American bat-wing RQ-170 Sentinel, says the engineer, who works for one of many Iranian military and civilian teams currently trying to unravel the drone’s stealth and intelligence secrets, and who could not be named for his safety.

Using knowledge gleaned from previous downed American drones and a technique proudly claimed by Iranian commanders in September, the Iranian specialists then reconfigured the drone's GPS coordinates to make it land in Iran at what the drone thought was its actual home base in Afghanistan.

"The GPS navigation is the weakest point," the Iranian engineer told the Monitor, giving the most detailed description yet published of Iran's "electronic ambush" of the highly classified US drone. "By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain."

The “spoofing” technique that the Iranians used – which took into account precise landing altitudes, as well as latitudinal and longitudinal data – made the drone “land on its own where we wanted it to, without having to crack the remote-control signals and communications” from the US control center, says the engineer.

This is an intelligence coup for the Iranians who will now be able to enlist the Russians and the Chinese to develop other countermeasures for the drones. It's also an embarrassment to have our president decline to destroy the drone while it was on the ground and instead abjectly ask the Iranians, who doubtless found the request an occasion for merriment, to give it back.

Perhaps if he had publicly bowed to Ahmadinejad like he did to other Middle East and Asian leaders the obeisance would have softened Iranian hearts and persuaded them to return the drone instead of selling access to it to the Russians and Chinese. I'm surprised he didn't try it.