Nah, Iran Probably Didn’t Hack CIA’s Stealth Drone

Four months after capturing a crashed U.S. stealth drone near the Iran-Afghanistan border, Tehran claims it has hacked into the ‘bot’s classified mission-control system. If true, it could mean Iran is making good on its vow to reverse-engineer the stealthy, Lockheed Martin-built RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone and produce homemade copies. But that’s not likely. “Based on my experience,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, a former CIA director, told reporters, “I would seriously question their ability to do what they say they’ve done.” A Pentagon drone program manager was far more blunt. Speaking to Danger Room on condition of anonymity, the program manager said Iran’s claim “sounds like complete bullshit.” No one wants to talk on the record about the super-secret Sentinel. The Air Force declined Danger Room’s requests for comment. So did Lockheed Martin. But they may not need to say anything. Iran’s public comments about the RQ-170 do a pretty good job of debunking themselves. Iran has a long history of faking major weapons developments. That said, many observers — myself included — at first believed Iran was lying about capturing the Sentinel. That, at least, turned out to be true. Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, aerospace division chief for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, told an Iranian news agency that his engineers gained access to the Sentinel’s encrypted hard drive, according to a weekend report by the Associated Press. ”We recovered part of the data that had been erased,” Hajizadeh said. “There were many codes and characters. But we deciphered them by the grace of God.” As proof, Hajizadeh cited what he claimed were records of the time the RQ-170 spent in maintenance in California. He said the Sentinel was in the Golden State on Oct. 16, 2010, for “technical work” before deploying to Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Nov. 18. There, the drone flew operational missions but ran into problems with its sensors, Hajizadeh said. So the U.S. sent the RQ-170 to Los Angeles in December 2010 for another tune-up. “If we had not achieved access to software and hardware of this aircraft, we would be unable to get these details,” Hajizadeh said. “Our experts are fully dominant over sections and programs of this plane.” Sorry, no. Details of the uber-stealthy RQ-170, which played a supporting role in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, are hard to come by. But the Iranians would have us believe the drone stores its missions like tweets, ready for someone to scroll through. Most autonomous warplanes load their missions during pre-flight preparation, and don’t store their records in an onboard hard drive. “Also,” wonders the Pentagon program manager, “exactly how would the aircraft ‘know’ it was ‘sent’ to California? It can’t fly from Afghanistan to Lockheed Martin’s Palmdale plant without stopping for gas a few dozen times. If it did go to home in 2010, it was probably in a C-17. My hunch is that the Iranians gathered some information using other sources and claimed it was obtained by hacking the 170′s systems.” On the other hand, if Hajizadeh is correct, and the RQ-170 really does keep all its mission data onboard, then that’s a stunning, amateurish security vulnerability. Drones malfunction. Drones crash. If a secret drone that flies over hostile territory actually contains a treasure trove of data for an adversary to recover, that might turn an embarrassment for the U.S. into a scandal.