So now Iran says it DID shoot down the Ukrainian plane!

Well it took them a few days but Iran has finally admitted early today it did shoot down the Ukrainian plane with 176 people on board. Here is the full version of what I wrote for The Times yesterday (Friday): Vital “raw” intelligence shared between the United States, Britain and Canada led to the conviction that an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps air-defence unit shot down the Ukrainian passenger aircraft with the loss of 176 lives, Western security sources have told The Times. Skilled analysis of US satellite imagery and intercepted communications on the ground in Iran provided the evidence which was referred to only in general terms by President Trump, Boris Johnson and Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister. Under the codenamed Echelon agreement, part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing arrangement between the US, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, formed in the late 1950s, all the images supplied by America’s satellites over the Middle East, operated by the US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), were passed around the members of the unique club. “The US knows that the UK and Canada have the skills to analyse such images as well as other intelligence but the details cannot be made public because it would give away technical capabilities,” one former top Western intelligence official said. The analysis of satellite images would have been combined with any electronic interceptions of communications between officers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps in the moments before the decision to launch the two surface-to-air missiles against the Ukrainian plane. The former intelligence official, however, said encryption technology was now so widely available that the Iranian military would normally “deeply encrypt” any communications, presenting a challenge to the codebreakers at Britain’s GCHQ, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE) and America’s National Security Agency (NSA). “Unless of course in the heat of the moment the Iranian military commanders used their mobile phones, but it is more likely the evidence came from US satellites and the interpretations that followed a peer review of the images,” the former official said. Mr Trudeau referred to “multiple sources”, however, indicating that some ground communications may have been intercepted. Any contacts would have been in Farsi, the official language in Iran, although there are numerous different dialects. GCHQ and the other Five Eyes members have computers to provide instant translations of Farsi. But Farsi language analysts would have been used to go through the translations to pick up any ambiguities or perceived errors, sources said. For the US, UK and Canadian leaders to come out publically and state their belief that Iranian missiles hit the Ukrainian plane, a network of listening and monitoring stations were involved in providing the evidence. The principal British one was GCHQ’s signals intelligence station at Ayios Nikolaos in eastern Cyprus which can tap into digital communications across the Middle East. Run by a tri-service British military unit, the station’s staff includes experts from NSA. The closely guarded facility on the main road to Famagusta is linked to all the Five Eyes members.