Iranian warplanes fired at an unmanned American military surveillance drone in international airspace over the Persian Gulf last week, Pentagon officials disclosed Thursday.

The shooting, which the Pentagon said occurred Nov. 1 — five days before the American presidential election — was the first known instance of Iranian warplanes firing on an American surveillance drone.

George Little, the top Pentagon spokesman, attributed the weeklong silence on the incident to restrictions on discussing classified surveillance missions. But it doubtless will raise questions about whether that silence had been meant to forestall an international controversy before the election. Had a decision been made to officially disclose the shooting, it might have been viewed as a provocative or even partisan political act before the voting.

Mr. Little discussed the episode during a Pentagon news conference only after the shooting had been disclosed by news organizations.

Late last year, a C.I.A. surveillance drone crashed deep inside Iranian territory while on a mission that was believed to be designed to map suspected nuclear sites. While some Iranian officials said the drone was shot down or guided to land safely through electronic intervention of its guidance system, American officials said it had crashed after a technical malfunction.

Assessing Iranian intentions has been difficult. American officials said the two Iranian warplanes involved in the episode were under command not of the air force, but of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, whose activities are routinely more brazen than those of the conventional Iran military.

Similarly, Iran has two navies: one, its traditional state navy of aging big ships dating from the era of the shah, and the other they olitically favored Revolutionary Guards navy of fast-attack speedboats and guerrilla tactics. Senior American naval officers say that the Iranian state navy is for the most part professional and predictable, but that the Revolutionary Guards navy, which has responsibility for the operations in the Persian Gulf, is not.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/09/w...week.html?_r=0