The Iranian Foreign Ministry claimed on Monday that Sunday’s daring American rescue of a downed pilot might have been a “deception operation” for a failed attempt to steal Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium.
“The area where the American pilot was claimed to be present in Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad Province is a long way from the area where they attempted to land or wanted to land their forces in central Iran,” said Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baqaei.
“The possibility that this was a deception operation to steal enriched uranium should not be ignored at all,” he insisted.
Baqaei disputed accounts of the American rescue mission as an astounding success, with no loss of life and significant casualties inflicted on Iranian ground forces who attempted to interfere with the rescue.
Instead, the Iranian spokesman said there were “many questions and uncertainties” about the operation, which he described as a “disaster” for the U.S. military.
Baqaei was referring to frantic efforts by the Iranian military to recast the rescue mission as an elaborate ruse to distract Iran’s forces from a U.S. special forces mission to secure the roughly 900 pounds of near-weapons-grade uranium Iran has enriched over the past decade.
The Washington Post reported last week that President Donald Trump asked the Pentagon to draw up a plan for using special forces operators to secure the uranium stockpile and fly it out of Iran, using a runway they would build especially for that purpose. The plan would reportedly have involved a major airlift of U.S. troops and excavation equipment to execute a complex operation to locate Iran’s uranium and recover it from underground storage facilities.
The Iranian military on Sunday claimed the U.S. attempted to implement that complicated plan in a fraction of the time it would have required, using the rescue of a downed pilot as cover.
“The so-called U.S. military rescue operation, planned as a deception and escape mission at an abandoned airport in southern Isfahan under the pretext of recovering the pilot of a downed aircraft, was completely foiled,” said Ebrahim Zolfaghari, a spokesman for the Iranian military.
Zolfaghari claimed President Trump’s statements about the rescue of the American pilot were “empty rhetoric and diversion,” but the “reality on the ground demonstrates the superior position of Iran’s powerful armed forces.”
The Jerusalem Post, on the other hand, wondered on Monday if the “impressive rescue” of the downed pilot could “enhance the chances of U.S. President Donald Trump approving a ground invasion of the Straits of Hormuz or of Kharg Island.”
“Collectively, the U.S. showed it can do far more than a hit-and-run raid by a few covert operatives for minutes behind enemy lines; it can operate in multiple locations with large forces for hours at a time. This could heavily boost Trump’s confidence to push through the risks of a large strategic invasion,” the paper speculated.
The Jerusalem Post went on to argue itself out of that position, noting that Iran has a better understanding of where U.S. forces would need to operate in a mission to seize control of Iran’s strategic Kharg Island, or to secure the entire Iranian coast of the Strait of Hormuz. Such operations would also require American forces to hold Iranian ground for much longer than they did in the Easter Sunday rescue.
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