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Tehran, 1/6/23
Using a spotty Iranian internet connection, I have been casting a few bemused cyber-glances homeward as Americans panic over a Chinese spy balloon. Republicans call Biden weak because he let the balloon meander over America for a couple of days before terminating it off the coast of South Carolina. Democrats say Biden did well to down it into the ocean, capture its spy tech payload, and avoid endangering civilians.
Here in Tehran, people are, as usual, simultaneously amused and appalled at America’s unique proprietary blend of arrogance and stupidity. How can the US feign outrage over China’s violation of its airspace with spy equipment, when the world’s worst violator of other nations’ sovereignty in general, and their airspace in particular, is that very same United States of America?
And since when is a balloon a national security threat? Spy satellites have been reading license plates since the 1960s—and peering through roofs, examining insect anatomy, and zooming in to people’s pores since the 1980s. Yet it seems that Bubba and Mrs. Bubba have only now discovered that somebody overhead is watching them guzzle beer in the back yard.
Shooting down a slow-drifting balloon at 60,000 feet — especially when the nation conducting the shootdown spends more money on its military than all the other major powers combined — is hardly a remarkable feat. But when Iran, on June 20, 2019, brought down a United States RQ-4A Global Hawk BAMS-D surveillance drone flying at about that same altitude, the world in general, and the US military in particular, was not just impressed, but stunned.
I recently visited the Tehran Aerospace Exhibition Center with a group of American journalists, including my False Flag Weekly News colleague J. Michael Springmann, who took the photos posted here.
That top-of-the-line US surveillance drone cost more than 200 million dollars. It was one of only four ever built, and one of only two that were operational. Boasting five different anti-radar systems, including shaping, engine coating, and exhaust cooling, the 40-meter-wingspan monstrosity, if even picked up by radar, barely registered. It could spoof ground systems and pass as a civilian passenger airliner, or imitate a flock of birds.
The Iranians knocked it down in one shot, using a 100% indigenous air defense system. What makes the feat even more impressive is that the drone was being tailed by a P8 Poseidon with at least a few dozen US servicemen on board. Iran’s ability to distinguish between the two planes and down the drone while leaving the manned plane unharmed showcased an impressive blend of technical proficiency and morality.
Despite Iran’s humanitarian avoidance of harming the P8 and its passengers, Trump came close to ordering an attack on Iran that would have killed around 50 people, or so he said when explaining why he had called it off. Iranian analysts suggest that Trump knows that Iran’s capacity for proportionate retaliation—every US base and ship in the region is in the crosshairs of Iran’s missiles—may have played a role.
The fact that Iran felt confident enough to down the drone in the first place greatly impressed a Chinese official, who expressed his nation’s astonished admiration to Iranian officials, according to Iranian analyst Dr. Khosh Chesm: “We respect you more after you shot this drone down with the first shot. We never expected Iran could do that,” the Chinese official told Iranian counterparts.
Indeed, Iran is the only nation on earth that has repeatedly downed or otherwise captured US surveillance drones. Even China, which has the technical proficiency to protect its airspace from anyone, threatens and if necessary fires on all intruders except American ones, who are routinely issued empty warnings yet allowed to go about their illegal, sovereign-airspace-violating business. For now, anyway.*
The 200 million dollar RQ4A is the crown jewel in Iran’s collection of downed drones. But it’s only one of many. Another that made the news is an RQ-170 Sentinel that Iran electronically hijacked and landed in 2011. Then-US-president Barack Obama famously begged the Iranians to give it back, to no avail.
According to Dr. Chesm, Iran has downed or captured at least one of all major US drones, spurring a reverse engineering program that has made Iran a leader in drone technology. Even Iran’s mid-level drones, whose capabilities are far below the top-of-the-line models, have been playing a significant role in the war in Ukraine, as evidenced by panicked US indignation and recent failed attacks on Iranian drone factories. Dr. Chesm told me that last week (as I was preparing to leave for Iran) three Israeli quadcopters, presumably flying with US blessings, attacked a drone factory in Isfahan. Two were intercepted by Iranian electronic defenses, “hit the suicide button” and exploded themselves, while the third was captured.
Iran views its drone/counterdrone activities as efforts to defend itself from an ongoing US hybrid war. In my next report from Tehran I will discuss Iranian views of that hybrid war.
*China’s reluctance to shoot down airspace violators stems from its extreme caution and willingness to go to almost any length to avoid risking war with the US. But in the wake of reports that the US may have sparked the 2018 chicken flu and 2019 bird flu epidemics by spraying farms with pathogens (precursors to the likely fall 2019 bio-attack on Wuhan?) followed by recent US efforts to arm Taiwan with some of the world’s most powerful weapons systems, the odds that China will continue to let the US systematically violate its airspace with military craft are declining precipitously. The balloon shootdown and ensuing US media circus may also help convince the Chinese to emulate Iran and start protecting themselves.
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Since yesterday, Mr. Barrett. Maybe you should reserve you witticisms until the dust settles down. Until then you put yourself in a precarious and ambiguous situation with pronouncements as follows:
The Kremlin denies information that Russia is using any Iranian-made weapons in Ukraine. In response to questions from journalists the other day, Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: “No, we have no such information: Russian equipment is being used, you know that, with Russian names. All other questions can be addressed to the Ministry of Defense.”
It’s a great big club,.. blah, blah, blah,.. bohica:
A spy balloon is no big deal, pretty pathetic by today’s standards, not even steerable, so they get good photos of Montana cow pastures. I tend to believe the Chinese, that it was just a weather balloon. Perhaps its true purpose was to freak out the stupid Americans.
I think it would be difficult to keep secret where these ‘Kamikaze’ exploding drones are manufactured so it may not be revelatory to suggest they are Iranian.
Iranian drone technology sure got those expensive American aircraft carriers beat.
listened again to your latest FFWN glad I did. E Michael Jones always great to listen to.
Hope Alan Sabrosky is OK. Looking forward to his follow-up article regarding the big myth, the one Cat McQuire mentioned was going to offer assistance. I like her too.
A psyop on the American peasants to the tune of five hundred Million dollars that will only last a couple of days. I’m certainly used to these things by now…
How does that balloon look in Jerusalem and Riyadh?
Trade winds run West–>East. Beijing has just handed out a clever idea.
PEACE 😇
“We have no such information…All other questions can be addressed to the Ministry of Defense.” That’s what’s called a “non-denial ‘denial’” i.e. a confirmation.
菲德里奥自动机 ,
Your true colors are showing through, made-in-china-bot.
Given lack of objective physical evidence, what we imagine the purpose of the balloon is depends on the movie we imagine we’re in.
The movie i imagine i’m in leads me to belive the balloon is actually what China says it is – but perhaps put into air currents that would cause it to drift where it did to test US political mindscape.
Iran, like NK, talks a big game but does their nasty work from the shadows because they know that if they annoy the USA too much then we will crush them like the insects that they are.
Meanwhile, the USA has admitted that it has problems detecting balloons? Perhaps this is what China has been testing? We should be embarrassed!
======
Top general says U.S. failed to detect previous Chinese balloons
Feb 2023
The Air Force general overseeing American air space admitted Monday that the military had failed to identify multiple Chinese surveillance balloons that flew over the U.S. in the past, calling it a “domain awareness gap.”
…
https://www.axios.com/2023/02/06/china-spy-balloons-air-force-general
If the goal was to make the Americans look stupid they succeeded beyond
their wildest dreams; if they wanted to create a precedent for shooting down
Pelosi that´s fine with me too 😀
LOL. The author should refrain from writing something that he does not know much about. Since the founding of the PRC in 1949, China has literally shot down hundreds, if not thousands of violators (most from US) in China’s airspace (and sea-space). And that was even when China had very little military budget and capability to defend herself. For example, very few Westerners know that five out of the six U-2 spy planes shot down by air missile were in mainland China. You still can visit the military museum in Beijing to see the wrecked U-2 planes in displayed today. It was probably the most important reason contributing to US discontinuing the mission for U-2 spy planes. Does this fact support author’s claim?
A more recent example happened in 2019. China’s J10C fighter fired a single missile to shoot down a spy balloon (thought to be from US). Unlike the civilian Chinese weather balloon, the downed spy balloon in China had a propeller system and therefore able to maneuver.
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1o4411y7m6/?spm_id_from=333.337.search-card.all.click
Most of this information were only available in Chinese sources. That is why most Westerners don’t even have a scintilla of what happened on the other side, and most Chinese are simply amused by the latest kabuki show in US.
” if they annoy the USA too much then we will crush them like the insects that they are.”
Big talk, from a little man, trying to make a corpse of a nation look strong.
It sure worked.
There were news that Congress had demanded the military stop buying drones from China but was told that local drones didn’t meet the specifications. Could it be that every Chinese drone sold to the US had their specifications sent to Iran so that the latter could find ways to shot them down?
Apparently Congress had told the military not to buy drones from China for security reasons but the advice was rejected because local drones couldn’t meet certain specifications. Could it be that every Chinese drone sold to the US had their specifications sent over to the Iranians?
“No, we have no such information: Russian equipment is being used, you know that, with Russian names. All other questions can be addressed to the Ministry of Defense.”
Throw a bunch of ‘ums’ in there and it sounds like KJP
Thanks Kim jong-un’s sister.
As you say – Americans don’t know Shinola about China —or Russia or Iran for that matter. This ignorance is going to get us all at once, some day. We are going to go to war with some country like Iran (at the total convenience of Israel, btw), and we are going to be amazed at how poorly our military really does and how well our enemies do.
I would be willing to bet anyone a hundred dollars that this spy balloon was really a weather research vehicle. Of course, our Government will never admit that – they will lie and lie about the Chinese spying while they will never admit to screwing up a biological weapon attack upon the whole world.
It is a good thing that America took to this type of Israeli lying in its old age – would have been total crap had I known our deep evilness while I was in the Viet Nam War – would have probably gone AWOL
As someone in the U.S., I haven’t seen or heard anyone comment on what seems to me to be an obvious issue. That is, the blast of Arctic air and high winds that caused record low temperatures coincided with the balloon’s traverse of the country. While I have no idea of the exact relation between temperatures and winds at ground level and those in the stratosphere, my assumption is that there is a correlation, i.e. that they trend the same, albeit with the normal wind speeds higher and temperatures lower in the stratosphere. If that is so, we have, at least on the face of it, evidence corroborating the Chinese claim that the balloon’s trajectory over the U.S. was the result of its veering off course. Actual wind currents caused the balloon to veer far from the more northerly trajectory it would have taken in normal weather conditions.
So basically you are saying Iran is better at air defense than the US….
Really, Fokvanger? How does it work, then? If the balloon is steerable, why did it go the long way round to get to the states? Was it spying on the many US war bases in Japan? Why did it approach Russia?
If the balloon is not steerable, was China just lucky that it flew over, sorry, hovered over Montana? And is there a state that doesn’t have USer militants basing themselves in it?
Remember Ukraine shooting a missile into its new best friend Poland? Accidents do happen.
Oh, please. The world was neither impressed or stunned – at best, mildly surprised. Surprised by the fact that Iranians “went there” and not by their technological advancement, because the ability to shoot down unarmed, subsonic, not especially stealthy objects at 60,000 ft is something that was demonstrated way back in the early 60s (when Soviets shot down U-2 spy plane)
Or maybe they just got lucky given 50-50 odds, because that blend of ‘proficiency and morality’ was strangely absent a few months later in Jan 2020 when they ‘accidentally’ shot down Ukrainian airliner that just took off from their own airport.
@raga10
Check out this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyNhE4Y2FCY
The U2 was not shot down, it crash landed, and it was an intentional hoax by the nascent deep state MIC to prevent a thaw in the Cold War.
What about five U-2 operated by Taiwanese that were shot down by the Chinese, also in the 60s? Were they all hoaxes too?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Cat_Squadron
http://www.taiwanairpower.org/u2/losses.html
How could they not? They went far beyond “quod licet Jovi…” long ago, now the rule is simply “it’s okay when we do it!”, quite openly. A good test case was Godwin’s Law, anyone who was on internet in the last 20 years knows how that went. The nu-Vatican and its friends do not maintain their fig leaves anymore.
But the US claimed the drone was very stealthy….
I don’t know what they claimed, but one look at the shape tells you it is not really built for stealth. It might have some sort of coating and/or electronics for jamming but it is not fundamentally stealthy design like the F-117 or the B-2 bomber.