Iran’s defense minister on Friday confirmed that Iranian warplanes had fired
shots at an American drone last week, but said that they had taken the action after the unmanned aircraft had entered Iranian airspace. The assertions by the defense minister, Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi, were the first acknowledgment from Iran that the episode had occurred. He spoke less than 24 hours after the Pentagon first disclosed the shooting, involving two Iranian jet fighters and the American aircraft, a Predator surveillance drone, during what American officials described as a routine surveillance mission on Nov. 1 in international airspace over the Persian Gulf.
It was the first time that Iranian aircraft had been known to fire at an American drone, one of the many ways that the United States has sought to monitor developments in Iran over more than three decades of estrangement between the two countries. The United States said it had protested the shooting via the American interests section at the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, and had warned the Iranians that the drone flights would continue.
Political risk analysts noted that the firing had taken place days before it was clear whether the American elections would be won by President Obama or his Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, who was far more hawkish than Mr. Obama in his public criticism of Iran during the campaign. Some said the episode may have been meant by the Iranians as warning message regardless of the outcome of the election. “The early November incident was probably an attempt by Iran to intimidate the next U.S. administration and gain leverage in future diplomacy,” said Cliff Kupchan, an Iran specialist at the Eurasia Group, a consulting firm in Washington.
American officials said the Predator had been flying 16 nautical miles off the Iranian coast. General Vahidi asserted the episode took place in Iranian airspace but did not specify where.
General Vahidi’s version of events also differed with the Pentagon’s in another way: He said the two Iranian planes, which the Pentagon had identified as Russian-made Su-25 jets known as Frogfoots, belonged to the Iranian Air Force. The Americans had said the planes were under the command of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which has a history of more aggressive behavior than the conventional air force and navy.
In one of Iran’s most brazen confrontations with the West, in March 2007, Revolutionary Guards seamen seized 15 British sailors and marines in disputed waters in the Persian Gulf and held them captive for nearly two weeks before President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had them released, in what he called a magnanimous gesture of Iranian compassion.
General Vahidi, whose account of the drone episode was reported by the Iranian Labor News Agency and other media outlets, said that last week an unidentified plane had entered Iranian airspace over its territory in the Persian Gulf. He said the intruder had been “forced to escape,” after action by Iran’s Air Force.
It is unclear why Iranian officials had kept the episode a secret. It also is unclear, from the Iranian account, whether the warplanes had sought to down the drone and missed, or had fired warning shots.
A lawmaker, Mohammad Saleh Jokar, a member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee of Iran’s Parliament, also said the American aircraft had trespassed. “Early last week, a U.S. drone which had violated Iran’s airspace received a decisive response by the armed forces that were stationed in the region,” he said in a Friday interview with the Young Journalist Club, a semiofficial Iranian news agency. He said the drone had “entered our country’s airspace with an aim to gather information because there is no other justification.”
The Predator’s sensor technology is so sophisticated that it could have monitored activities in Iran from the distance cited by the Pentagon officials.
The Iranian firing on the aircraft had been completely legal, Mr. Jokar said. “Any violation against Iran’s airspace, territorial waters and land will receive a strong response by the Islamic republic of Iran,” he said.
Two commanders also gave interviews on Friday emphasizing Iran’s right to defend itself. “Defenders of the Islamic republic of Iran will give a decisive response to any air, land and naval attacks,” the deputy commander of Iran’s armed forces, Massoud Jazayeri, told the Fars News Agency, which is headed by a former officer of the Revolutionary Guards. “If any foreign flying objects enter our country’s airspace, the armed forces will confront them,” he said.
Another officer, the commander of the Khatam al-Anbiya Air Defense Base, told the state Islamic Republic News Agency that his forces were able to counter “all threats.”
A possible confrontation in the Persian Gulf could present new obstacles in efforts to make progress on resolving the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program, the most intractable issue in Iran’s difficult relations with the West. But in what appeared to be a sign of possible progress, the International Atomic Energy Agency announced Friday that it was resuming negotiations with Iran regarding inspector access to sensitive Iranian sites, aimed at resolving questions about whether Iran had engaged in nuclear weapons development work.
The agency said in an announcement that it was sending negotiators to Tehran on Dec. 13, the first such meeting since August. An agency spokeswoman, Gill Tudor, said in an e-mail to news agencies that the purpose of the talks was “to conclude the structured approach to resolving outstanding issues related to Iran’s nuclear program.”
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