Pegasus Decoy, Fake Messages: How US Ensured It Reached Downed Airman First

A race against time unfolded as a colonel, one of the two-man crew of the downed US' F-15E aircraft, hid in a narrow crevice up a 7,000 feet mountain ridge, hoping that the American forces find him but also fearing that the Iranians don't find him first. What gave the US an edge in the 36-hour mission that ended with his rescue was technology - a Pegasus software that deceived Iranian authorities and a tool that detected 'Dude44 Bravo's heartbeat.

Per a Times report, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) hatched an elaborate plot to deceive the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) into thinking the colonel had already been rescued after the aircraft was down on April 3. Using the Pegasus spyware, developed by an Israeli company, the US hacking into mobile phones of several Tehran and IRGC leaders to spread information that the airman had been found and was being taken in a road convoy for exfiltration by sea.

US intelligence services widely use Pegasus to harvest data without detection and can be used to send out messages through WhatsApp and Signal that appear genuine, per the report.

Pegasus was deployed to work in tandem with Ghost Murmur, a classified technology that detected the injured airman's heartbeat using quantum magnetometry, even as he refrained from establishing regular radio contact or beaming the personal "come-and-get-me" beacon signal. Reportedly developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works, Ghost Murmur blurred out all other environmental noises with the help of artificial intelligence to pinpoint the weapons systems officer's location, the report added. Together, these technologies helped locate the airman in an operation that could easily be equated to finding a grain of sand across a 40-mile stretch of a barren landscape.

Despite possible confusion as the software would have likely detected multiple heartbeats, given that the IRGC deployed its forces and tribesmen in the same area to find the airman. Yet, when he stood at up on the mountainside and the rescuers moved closer, his heartbeat was captured.

The US' Seal Team Six promptly boarded AH-6 Little Bird special forces helicopters, commandos strapped to the outer benches, at the ready to rescue the airman when he was finally seen. Israel carried out strikes along with the US to provide cover to the American commandos during the rescue operation, per New York Times. The rescue operation was estimated to cost over $500 million, involving special operations troops and multiple aircraft.

When New York Post asked US President Donald Trump about the technology, he reportedly said, "Nobody even knows what it is. Nobody ever heard of it before. We have many other things that nobody has ever heard about."

The pilot of the downed F-15E, the first US aircraft to have been lost over Iranian territory since the war began on February 28, was rescued earlier.