Iran claims US faked pilot rescue operation in April

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has dismissed the US account of a dramatic rescue of a downed Air Force officer as pure fiction and “Hollywood propaganda.”

Brigadier General Hossein Mohebbi, the IRGC spokesperson, made the remarks in an interview with Iran’s official news agency IRNA on Wednesday.

He was responding to a recent CBS “60 Minutes” interview in which the American airman, identified only by the call sign Bravo, described surviving the shoot-down of his F-15E Strike Eagle over central Iran in early April and enduring more than a day in mountainous terrain before US forces extracted him.

Mohebbi claimed that no rational person could accept the US narrative.

“No sound mind would accept their narrative because it is fictional and unacceptable,” he told IRNA.

He mocked Bravo’s account of falling at roughly 160 kilometers per hour with a damaged parachute that failed to open and still surviving after crashing into a mountainside.

The general framed the television segment as an attempt to manufacture a success story from what Iran calls a failed American aggression.

“The story… was akin to the scripts of Hollywood movies and a clear attempt to manufacture an achievement from the failed aggression on Iran,” Mohebbi said.

He added that the United States has a long history of inventing such tales about its military operations abroad.

In related comments carried by Iranian outlets, Mohebbi accused Washington of splicing together unrelated video clips to create heroic scenes.

He noted that images circulating at the time showed wreckage of the downed F-15 being collected in a wheelbarrow, undercutting claims of a seamless US operation.

“The U.S. is embarrassing itself with these actions. These films (pilot interview) will definitely not only fail to bring any achievement… but will also become a source of ridicule,” he said.

According to U.S. officials, the two-man F-15E crew was on a strike mission in April against Iranian industrial sites linked to drones and missiles when Iranian air defenses hit the jet over Isfahan province.

Both airmen ejected; the pilot (call sign Alpha) was recovered within hours, while Bravo, the weapons systems officer and a colonel, hid with injuries for roughly 36 hours before a complex extraction involving special forces, dozens of aircraft, electronic jamming, and a CIA deception campaign.

US accounts, including statements from President Donald Trump and Central Command, described the rescue as successful despite Iranian claims at the time that the operation had been thwarted and multiple American aircraft destroyed.

No US personnel were reported captured.

Iranian state media had previously publicized rewards for the capture of any downed pilots and released images of what it said was wreckage from the rescue effort.