A four-second video has emerged, purporting to be from the Russian Defense Ministry and showing the Russian intercept of a U.S. MQ-9 Predator drone over the Black Sea yesterday. The text accompanying the video claims that the pod which can be seen under the drone’s fuselage is carrying the Gorgon Stare surveillance system. Gorgon Stare is a spherical array of nine optical cameras which the U.S. Air Force refers to as a “wide-area surveillance sensor system.” It can reportedly capture imagery of an entire city. The drone went down into the waters of the Black Sea after it was intercepted by two Russian Su-27 jet fighters, a loss which the U.S. blamed on “unprofessional actions” of the two Russian pilots.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, at a Pentagon press conference today, asserted that nothing was compromised in the device that went down with the drone. The Biden Administration has not, of course, confirmed that the drone was equipped with Gorgon Stare or any other surveillance system, only that it was on an intelligence gathering mission. National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told CNN yesterday that because of the classified nature of the mission the U.S. has “taken steps to protect our equities with respect to that particular drone—that particular aircraft.”
“It’s the United States’ property,” Kirby said. “We obviously don’t want to see anybody getting their hands on it beyond us.” Whether the drone wreckage can be recovered is still an open question, however, with Kirby saying this morning that it went down in “very deep water.”
Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Director Sergey Naryshkin said in an interview this morning that the U.S. has been actively conducting reconnaissance in the Black Sea region using all means, including space, visual and radio reconnaissance. “We know and understand in detail what goals the Americans have been pursuing with their recon activities and use of technical means as we try to identify the facilities and territories that are of the greatest interest to them,” he said.
