Iran's military has started to build a copy of a US surveillance drone captured last year after breaking the software encryption, Iranian media reported Sunday. General Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guards aerospace division, said engineers were in the final stages of decoding data from the Sentinel aircraft, which came down in December near the Afghan border, Mehr news agency reported. However, US Senator Joe Lieberman, a member of the Armed Services Committee, voiced his own doubts. “There's a history here of Iranian bluster, particularly now when they're on the defensive because of our economic sanctions against them,” Lieberman said in a television interview. 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.
