The stunning rescue operation of the crew member of the US F-15 fighter jet that was shot down over Iran over the last week has shed light on the deception campaign carried out by the CIA to draw Iran’s attention away from the American weapons officer who was hiding in a mountain.
Though it was already out that the US intelligence agency CIA carried out a deception campaign, a report that appeared in The New York Times has detailed how the agency spread the word that the US managed to find the airman and was being moved out of the country in a ground convoy. The hope was that the Iranians would shift their search from the place where the airman was thought to be and focus instead on the roads out of the region, according to reports.
This created confusion among the Iranians, who intensified their search. They even called on the public via the state’s primary broadcaster to capture the “enemy’s pilot or pilots” and turn them over alive to security forces for a reward.
According to former CIA station chief Dan Hoffman, the CIA's attempt to deceive the Iranians into believing the U.S. was gearing up for a maritime rescue may have been successful when, in reality, the airman was exfiltrated from the mountains.
"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," Hoffman told Fox News.
On the CIA's modus operandi, Hoffman said the CIA would have found channels of communication that it knew could be exploited, the channels the Iranian security forces were 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.