MatzavSLY OPERATION: Former CIA Chief Reveals Agency Tricked Iran Into Hunting Wrong Location For Downed US Airman
A former senior CIA official said a sophisticated deception effort may have played a key role in drawing Iranian forces away from a downed U.S. airman, shedding light on how the high-stakes rescue mission unfolded behind enemy lines.
Dan Hoffman, speaking on “The Sunday Briefing,” described reports that the CIA misled Iranian authorities into preparing for a rescue at sea, while the actual extraction was carried out in mountainous terrain.
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According to Hoffman, the agency not only helped obscure the real rescue plan but also actively monitored both the stranded airman and Iranian units searching for him.
“The CIA was there to track [the airman’s] location… And then at the same time, the CIA is tracking Iranian security forces, their movements, their efforts to find and fix the location of our airman. And then, at the same time, running this deception operation, an extraordinary operation.”
He emphasized the difficulty of locating the isolated service member in rugged terrain while under pursuit.
“I’ve heard it referred to as looking for a needle in a haystack. I think it’s more like a needle in a stack of needles. Extraordinarily difficult,” said Hoffman.
The remarks come after the early Sunday rescue of a U.S. Air Force weapons systems officer who ejected from an F-15E fighter jet over Iran and remained concealed for roughly a day and a half before being recovered.
Hoffman noted that the airman’s survival likely depended heavily on training received in the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program.
From an intelligence standpoint, Hoffman explained that the deception itself may have been relatively straightforward to execute, relying on known communication channels monitored by Iranian forces.
“The CIA would have looked to find those channels of communication that we know we can exploit that the Iranian security force are listening to. Iran has a… pretty developed cyber capability. And what we would have done is simply supplied some information there, some of it true, to establish the bona fides of the channel that we were using, and then this deception operation would have been run in that channel,” Hoffman said.
{Matzav.com}