James Woolsey |
The theory that an Iranian mole working inside the American military helped down a highly classified U.S. spy drone is a possibility, former CIA director James Woolsey said today in a radio interview.
Although labeling such as scenario "unlikely," Woolsey said an Iranian spy in the U.S. military or intelligence apparatus is "not something that you can completely discount."
"An insider can do a lot of damage," Woolsey continued. "You think about this when you are designing these systems and try to make it difficult, very difficult, for an insider to do anything catastrophic."
"But you can never discount that possibility when we have evidence of a senior CIA officer, Aldrich Ames, and a senior FBI agent, (James) Hansen, working for the Russians year after year after year as they did," he said. "You have to believe that it's at least possible that people in other parts of the government have done the same."
Woolsey was speaking in an interview on "Aaron Klein Investigative Radio" on New York's WABC Radio.
Click here to listen to Klein's interview with Woolsey.
Woolsey pointed to Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who reportedly provided WikiLeaks with droves of documents, including highly classified cables, as an example of the damage that can be caused by one individual with access to sensitive data.
"Although not working for a foreign power," Woolsey said, "[Manning was] able to provide Wikileaks with hundreds of thousands of very classified diplomatic cables and diplomatic reports and quite possibly got some American assets overseas killed and some friends of the United States who were being candid with us in foreign governments thrown out of office or worse."
Last week, the Christian Science Monitor quoted an Iranian engineer now working on the captured U.S. drone's systems as stating his country guided the CIA's stealth drone to an intact landing inside hostile territory by exploiting a navigational weakness long-known to the U.S. military.
The U.S. military has maintained that a technical failure caused the drone to be downed in Iran.
In the interview today, Woolsey put chances of Iran hacking into the U.S. drone at "well below 50-50, but it's not zero."
As to the information Iran can obtain from the drone, Woolsey commented, "It's probably going to be quite difficult for them to get anything of great significance."
Contended Woolsey: "First of all, the information that it collects is sent back, it's not stored on the aircraft. And the technologies are especially designed in such as way as to hedge against the possibility of a drone crashing or being shot down and taken in hand by the people we were flying it against."
Woolsey added that he thought Russia or China could extract more data from the drone than Iran could.